How to shuffle

It would be naive to expect Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to drop his tainted ministers in the course of the impending Cabinet reshuffle, more so since the UPA government appears to have decided to brazen it out in the Bihar dissolution case despite the slap on the wrist by the Supreme Court.

The issue, however, is not merely one of tainted ministers, or your taint versus mine, but a larger one of sculpting a Cabinet that is in keeping with the needs of the times.

The issue that Dr Singh has to ponder over is whether, in this day and age, so many ministries are required, other than for parking fractious allies. When private sector steel producers far outstrip the public sector’s production, and when imports are always an option, what purpose does it serve to have a full ministry that deals with just steel?

Similarly, it is difficult to appreciate the use of two ministries of employment—the ministry of labour and employment (K Chandrasekhar Rao is the minister) and the ministry of urban employment and poverty alleviation (Kumari Selja)—when the big daddy of unemployment schemes, the National Rural Employment Guarantee, is going to be administered through the ministry of rural development (Raghuvansh Prasad Singh).

In any case, it is obvious by now that poverty alleviation requires jobs, and they will come about only through the industry ministry, the finance ministry, various infrastructure ministries, and general de-bureaucratisation, none of which falls under the purview of any of the unemployment ministries.

If single-industry ministries served a purpose, India’s textile industry would not have lost one market opportunity after another, and been less alert than rivals in exploiting the market opportunities thrown up by the new international trading rules.

The culprit is a policy of trying to promote employment by giving special concessions to power looms; and a labour policy that discourages units from capacity expansion beyond a point.

Having a textiles ministry in place, however, has not changed the rules of the game for labour, and the move to reduce concessions for power looms and to therefore stop discouraging larger mills was not so much a textiles ministry initiative as it was part of an overall reforms policy.

To the extent the ministry also looks after all the NTC mills, the steel logic applies—why do you need NTC when there are so many private producers? Similarly, there are multiple ministries for energy, and (inexplicably) separate ministries for agriculture and for food. What multiple ownership of any problem usually means is lack of full-scale cooperation, and evidence of tugging at the edges.

The Prime Minister has a special opportunity to trim his Cabinet this time because several of his ministerial colleagues are no longer in office for a variety of reasons (Jagdish Tytler, Sunil Dutt and Shibu Soren come to mind).

Also, some ministers are clearly not performing and will have to go, the name most frequently heard in this context being that of the power minister, PM Sayeed.

Why not take the position that ministers who are no longer part of the government will not be replaced? And if there have to be fresh inductees, why not? There are plenty of bright young men who have been waiting in the wings.