Disclaimer :- This is an exclusive UPSCTREE write up.The italicized sentences are the inputs we derived from other sources.
Background:-
It was an afternoon of a Thursday, unlike any, it was significant because it was a particular day of a particular year – November 19,1863 and it was the Abraham Lincoln speaking from the podium of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Yes, that’s right.It was not a date of great war or signing of a great treaty , it was just a speech that had the power to influence the generations of the time and generation yet to come.
And a single sentence of the speech left undying impression on Human landscape forever.
“government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”
That single line had such power that it ultimately defined democracy.No body writes about democracy without writing the sentence irrespective of whether it is an essay to be written by a school-goer or an erudite examining the functioning of democracy.
More than a century has passed since that afternoon and more and more countries became democracies in the process.Yet , the sentence still has profound meaning for the ruled and for the ruler.
Democracy was the utopia that started with great expectations , it delivered some and it faltered to deliver some.But, democracy is not a one day or one year affair – it is a work in progress and it will always be as such
And, like any work in progress , it had to change,reform , adapt ,endure and deliver continuously.
Change is constant , and in order to be a constant affair, democracy has to change.Change begin with reforms, reforms begins with adaptation , adaptation ensures endurance , and when there is endurance – deliverance is guaranteed.
A look around all democracies in the world, tells us that , people are undoubtedly proud of it , people are satisfied with it and people are dissatisfied with it too.It evokes mixed response and mixed emotions.
To make it more robust, more meaningful and more relevant – there is a call for another round of Gettysburg address.But this time, no leader has to take podium or give a speech , instead it requires calculated rearrangement and calibrated decision making.What those decisions are and what those rearrangements thus calls for assessment.
Another round of – “For the people, of the people and by the people “:-
Recently , the private sector’s response to customer demands has also raised public expectations for government services. In this context, what should governments focus on prioritizing and getting right?
At its simplest, what governments should be focusing on is what citizens want. At one level, that’s a very trite answer, but where we think there’s an interesting layer to that is that there do seem to be a set of outcomes that citizens increasingly care about.
Those outcomes require departments and agencies to work together in ways that they’ve never done before. More and more governments are setting a smaller number of very meaningful outcomes that citizens want, and they end up being things like reducing street crimes or making the street clean or delivering services in real-time.
A big thing that governments have to get right, and get right at the outset, is that digital is not just about digital. It’s integral to every discussion you have on major policy issues. That just like big corporations, you can’t just put digital in a corner of government activity and leave that to a check-savvy department. You have to integrate it with the main purposes of government. You have to put the muscle of a bigger purpose behind it to actually drive it through.
One point to raise here, is whether to use the word prioritize. Governments struggle with that tremendously because it implies trade-offs have to be made. While it’s easy to identify a long list of things that governments want to do, be it because fiscally they have to or because citizens want them to, the challenge is often what they do not do. Usually getting that list is pretty straightforward, but the most difficult part is getting a cabinet together and for them to actually say, “At what point do we say this is no longer a priority? Or is this a priority maybe for later?”
In a modern democracy, when there are more voices from more parts of society and the political spectrum, it can be hard for government to make choices. To some extent, you’re squeezed. You’ve got more things that you have to deal with. There’s not a lot more money to be able to work to address that with.
That’s a huge opportunity for government, and it’s also a challenge in the sense if you went back 10, 15 years, for most citizens their expectations of the department of an agency were set by another government department or another agency. Today, their expectations are driven by the private sector. They’re driven by their digital experience with a bank, with their mobile-phone provider, with their pay-TV provider.
One little insight that we’ve seen from several countries that have done this quite well is that, if you’re a consumer company, historically, if you were a customer of mine, I used to look at you in terms of how productive my relationship with you was over a one-year period. Increasingly, what world-class consumer companies are doing is looking at the value of a customer over a lifetime. Essentially, what is the value of that customer journey, that customer experience, over the whole time of the relationship? Believe it or not, governments have never done that. They’ve always looked at you, , and what the nature of your relationship was over the last year ?
Thus, reforms are important, but what is more important is – increasing people’s participation demands better service across range of issues.And to deliver that , the government has to keep check and reassess , not once in a decade but probably once in a year.That could make democracy more meaningful.
Democracy transcended it’s core that is- people’s participation.In a modern democracy , people are not there just to vote , they are here to demand.And the demands have moved from ideological arena to delivery of day-to-day services.The demands can be as simple as – baby food in trains , 24hr electricity , cleaning the clogged drainage system of a city or getting a passport with in a day.
A close look at the demands tells us that , whatever the government services are there – they don’t have the luxury of time anymore.A citizen does not expect to get his/her passport in a month anymore ,he/she wants it in a day.In a faster age , delivery got to be faster, else democracy will lose its meaning.
In modern democracy, the demands are not about getting the political right anymore. It is about getting the social and economic justice – not in 100 years but in lightning speed.Governments will be judged on this parameters and will be voted in or out on this basis.
Speed is the new core of democracy and the mantra is – “democracy is there, just make the services simpler,faster and real-time”.
If one wants to achieve speed , one needs to do away with discretion in decision making, and make it digital and transparent. Corruption will erode as discretion erodes.So speed will help in curbing all other negative externalities that became synonymous with democracy such as – bribery, corruption, policy-paralysis etc.Speed will indeed help in restoring the public faith that mutated to public cynicism over the past decades.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.