The New “ Cabinet Mission Plan”

Under the UPA Government, India has been run by about 30 Cabinet Ministers and 12 ministers of state with an Independent charge, which needless to say is “Top Heavy”.  There is a current legislative ceiling on the size of the total council of ministers at 15% of the strength of the house & hence the size of the total council of ministers is around 80; this needs to be brought down to 10% and progressively reduced thereafter.  Organizations worldwide are turning “lean” and “lean In” to ensure greater gender participation & there is no reason why the same should not be expected of the Indian government. Needless to say pruning needs to start at the very top & talented personnel like Sushma Swaraj, Smriti Irani et al be brought in to ensure that the “power of 49” be truly achieved.. Critics could however cringe & argue that while a “lean” council of ministers is desirable, coalition compulsions make it impossible.  However, with the BJP winning 284 seats on its own; the largest won by any single part since 1984, & with a decisive leader like Narendra Modi at the helm, we should see this requirement getting fulfilled: after all Modi ran Gujarat with a  7 member cabinet & 9 junior ministers. The Red flag however is on the likely concentration of power & portfolios with the PM, as it happened in Gujarat, which is not recommended.

Therefore, there is an urgent need for a new “Cabinet Mission plan” with ministries getting restructured and targets assigned; else moving away from the sub 5% GDP growth to higher realms would be nothing but a pipe dream & it would take no time for the current euphoria to turn into despondency. The “demographic dividend” would convert into a “demographic curse” & end up creating political and social upheavals. I suggest the following as part of ministerial restructuring.

The Fab 4 CCS (Cabinet committee of security): Ministry of Finance, Defence, Home and external affairs form part of the fab 4 ministries, generally reserved for the political heavyweights. While Home & Defence ministries should retain their current structure we should combine both of them in the medium term to form the “Ministry of Security”. IB & RAW which report to the PM should be brought under such a ministry which combined with the Military Intelligence under the defence ministry could help us have better co-ordination of both internal and external security.  Similarly, it would be prudent to put corporate affairs under the finance ministry and the tourism, culture and overseas affairs under the external affairs ministry. With a large content of today’s diplomacy being ‘economic”, it would be prudent to have foreign trade also under the MOEF. Currently, the National security advisor (NSA), reports to the PM directly & operates intrusively into the ministry of external affairs; genuine independence to the ministry is hence an urgent need.

Currently these ministries are run by 6 cabinet ministers and 2 MOS with an independent charge; we could do with 4 cabinet ministers alone.

Nos	Ministry	Minister	Type
1	Minister of Finance	Shri P. Chidambaram	Cabinet Minister
	Ministry of Corporate Affairs	Shri Sachin Pilot	MOS (I)
2	Minister of Defence	Shri A.K. Antony	Cabinet Minister
3	Minister of Home Affairs	Shri Sushilkumar Shinde	Cabinet Minister
4	Minister of External Affairs	Shri Salman Khurshid	Cabinet Minister
	Minister of Overseas Indian Affairs	Shri Vayalar Ravi	Cabinet Minister
	Ministry of Tourism	Shri K Chiranjeevi	MOS (I)
	Minister of Culture	Smt Chandresh Kumari Kathoch	Cabinet Minister

The Famous 5: These Ministries shall form the list of ministers with the level of importance next to the CCS. While we classify our economy under the broad heads of agriculture, Industry and Services, accounting for 14%, 15% and 71% of India’s GDP, we do not have ministries structured on similar lines. The break-up of such ministries to cater to coalition pressures ensures diffusion and sometimes dissolution of responsibility. The need of the hour is consolidation, with the leader at the helm of each vertical being given a yearly target on growth.

 The ministries of steel, textiles, heavy industries and public enterprises, Micro & SME, and chemicals should be consolidated under the industry ministry. The minister needs to make a decisive push for exports and hence should handle the commerce ministry too. The other alternative is to have the commerce portfolio under the ministry of external affairs: a point discussed earlier. 

The Ministry of agriculture should encompass food & public distribution, fertilizers, food processing & water resources; thus handling the entire value chain from the farm gate to the consumer plate. The national project on interlinking of rivers should come under this ministry & MNREGA funds should be diverted to get this going, thereby shifting from a system of eking out doles to a process of creating capital assets. Interlinking of rivers shall reduce India’s dependence on the rain gods and help boost agricultural productivity and going forward help in the development of an inland water transport system. However the resettlement of displaced citizenry, a consequence of such a national project, needs to be better handled.

The ministry of technology & services should include IT, science & technology, telecom, earth sciences & space. While the Indian IT & ITES industry is an over $110 billion dollar industry contributing much to “invisibles” targets should be imposed on the ministry of space for a larger no of launches of international satellites on the PSLV and going forward on the GSLV platform, thereby bringing in the necessary foreign exchange.

There is an urgent need to improve India’s Infrastructure. The ministry of transport should include the ministries of civil aviation, railways, road Transport & highways & shipping. Land acquisition troubles and delay in environmental clearances form the current crop of troubles which need to be addresses. Regulators should be appointed for each of the four verticals and the minister could do without any junior ministers.

India needs energy security. Therefore all the ministries related to energy like Petroleum and natural gas, New and renewable energy, coal, mines and power should be bought under the same roof.  Currently we have a despicable situation of about 50000 MW of power plants lying idle due to lack of coal linkages. This ministry, hopefully, shall be able to arrange for denationalization of coal & auction of coal blocks, bringing in companies like BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto etc. into India which in the medium term shall ensure that India does not need to import coal; something despicably we do today, inspite of having the 3^rd largest coal reserves in the world.

Currently we have these 5 ministries run by 16 cabinet ministers and 4 MOS with an Independent charge; we could do with 5 cabinet ministers.

1	Minister of Commerce & Industry	Shri Anand Sharma	Cabinet Minister
	Minister of Steel	Shri Beni Prasad Verma	Cabinet Minister
	Minister of Textiles	Dr. Kavuru Samba Siva Rao	Cabinet Minister
	Minister of Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises	Shri Praful Patel	Cabinet Minister
	Ministry of Micro , Small and Medium Enterprises	Shri K.H. Muniyappa	MOS (I)
	Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers	Shri Srikanth Jena	MOS (I)
2	Minister of Agriculture and Minister of Food Processing Industries	Shri Sharad Pawar	Cabinet Minister
	Minister of Water Resources	Shri Harish Rawat	Cabinet Minister
	Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution	Shri K V Thomas	MOS (I)
3	Ministry of Technology
	Minister of Science and Technology	Shri S. Jaipal Reddy	Cabinet Minister
	Minister of Earth Sciences
	Department of Space	Shri Manmohan Singh	PM
	Minister of Communications and Information Technology	Shri Kapil Sibal	cabinet Minister
4	Minister of Energy
	Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas	Shri M. Veerappa Moily	Cabinet Minister
	Minister of New and Renewable Energy	Dr. Farooq Abdullah	Cabinet Minister
	Minister of Coal	Shri Shriprakash Jaiswal	Cabinet Minister
	Minister of Mines	Shri Dinsha J. Patel	Cabinet Minister
	Ministry of Power	Shri Jyotiradiya Madhavrao Scindia	MOS (I)
	Department of Atomic Energy	Shri Manmohan Singh	PM
5	Ministry of Transport
	Minister of Civil Aviation	Shri Ajit Singh	Cabinet Minister
	Minister of Railways	Shri Mallikarjun Kharge	Cabinet Minister
	Minister of Road Transport and Highways	Shri Oscar Fernandes	Cabinet Minister
	Minister of Shipping	Shri G.K. Vasan	Cabinet Minister

The next seven:

The ministry of rural development should include tribal affairs and Panchayati Raj while urban development should include housing and urban poverty alleviation. The country needs to move towards greater financial devolution to the states & allow them the flexibility of making local planning models; a move away from the current system of centralization under the planning commission.  The job of the planning commission should be made advisory with the job of benchmarking the planning models across states and helping in the replication of best practices across the country.

Till date social justice & empowerment concentrated largely on SC/ST’s only. Their role should be expanded to include minority affairs too since the Sachar committee indicates that the plight of minorities is worse off than even  the SC/ST. Hopefully, when India is finally awakened, we might not have any use of such a ministry. It is a travesty of justice that even after 66 years after independence we have women travelling long distances for collecting water in rural and people paying the tanker mafia to have access to clean drinking water in urban. Ministry of drinking water and sanitation should therefore come under the Social development ministry. The AAP government in Delhi worked on the guideline of 125 liters/head per day as the water requirement, a takeaway from international guidelines and this ministry should be tasked with its achievement.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Parliamentary affairs, law and justice should retain their current structure. The Ministry of Environment and forests who has been accused of “rent seeking” during the election campaign could do with a regulator and not a ministry in the medium term.

Currently these ministries are run by 9 cabinet ministers and 2 MOS with Independent charge; we could do with 7 cabinet ministers.

1	Minister of Rural Development	Shri Jairam Ramesh	Cabinet Minister
	Minister of Tribal Affairs	Shri V. Kishore Chandra Deo	Cabinet Minister
	Minister of Panchayati Raj
2	Ministry of Urban development	Kamal Nath
	Minister of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation	Dr. Girija Vyas	Cabinet Minister
3	Ministry of Information and Broadcasting .	Shri Manish Tewari	MOS (I)
4	Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment	Kumari Selja	Cabinet Minister
	Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation	Shri Bharatsinh Solanki	MOS (I)
	Minister of Minority Affairs	Shri K. Rahman Khan	Cabinet Minister
5	Ministry of Environment and Forests	M. Veerappa Moily	Cabinet Minister
6	Ministry of Parliamantary affairs	Kamal Nath	Cabinet Minister
7	Minister of Law and Justice	shri Kapil sibal	Cabinet Minister

The most important ministry:  The ministry of HRD shall truly create India’s future & therefore should include the ministries of youth affairs and sports and women and child development, health and family welfare, labour and employment, personnel public grievances and pensions,.  Thus it would handle the entire chain from child birth till personnel retirement. Since there is a demand that we need to spend a disproportionate share of the budget on health and education, it is this ministry which shall be involved in making the most of “human capital”.  This ministry instead of concentrating on rewriting of textbooks or wrangling on the independence of autonomous institutions like the IITs/IIMs should concentrate on skills enhancement and hence make our demographic dividend job capable. Job creation in India is contingent on labour reforms & since it is difficult to arrive at an immediate national consensus; it would be prudent to devolve the responsibility to the states & create a climate of a positive competition amongst them to attract industry

1	Minister of Human resources
	Minister of Health and Family Welfare	Shri Ghulam Nabi Azad	Cabinet Minister
	Minister of Labour and Employment	Shri Sis Ram Ola	Cabinet Minister
	Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions	Shri Manmohan Singh	PM
	Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports	Shri Jitendra Singh	MOS (I)
	Ministry of Women and Child Development	Smt. Krishna Tirath	MOS (I)

Thus, Modi can swear in 17 cabinet ministers and do with double that number of junior ministers thereby having about 50 council of ministers. This act alone shall send a signal of reform both nationally and internationally. CCI (cabinet committee of Investment) has cleared projects worth over 6 lakh crores but they have got struck at the state level. Therefore there is an urgent need to have a single window clearance mechanism at the state level too. Clearly, working only on a “mission mode” can ensure that India is brought back on track- a high growth superhighway again.