Getting out of comfort zone applies to administrators too

Recently,in his first face-to-face interaction with students after a two-year gap, at the fifth edition of “Pariksha Pe Charcha, the Prime Minister talked,among other things,about students’ general tendencyto prepareeasy and comfortable part of their syllabus, leaving aside hard, difficult portions.He exhorted them to come out from this comfortable zone to gain confidence and do well at the examination. While the advice is very useful for the students,it also appliesequally to our administrators, bureaucrats, and policy makers. It is not uncommon to see howat timesthey are found to ignore or sidestep the difficult and challenging part in implementation of policies or projects to avoid hard work, complexity or potential conflictsinvolved. The reasons or motives may be many- lack of diligence or courage, temptation to winquick brownie points with higher-ups or herald a success pre-maturely. Take for instance,the banking reforms.To review governance of Boards of Banks in India, a committee, well known as PJ Nayak Committee, was set up by the Reserve Bank of India in 2014. A landmark onein the recent decades, the Report recommended far-reaching reforms in Indian banks. The objective was to improve corporate governance in the banking sector, making it resilient and efficient, and to also provide autonomyto the banksin strategic decision making. The government showed right signals and commitment to implement the Report. The hard part of the recommendations was to repeal the Bank Nationalization Act, set up a Bank Investment Company(BIC) as a holding company, and transfer government shares in the BIC. Until BIC is formed, the Report recommended, a temporary body, called the Banking Boards Bureau (BBB),will be formed to carry out the functions of the BIC. Among the simple partwas the recommendation that BBB will advise on appointments to the Board, Banks’s Chairmanand Managing Director and other Executive Directors, Compensation issues, etc. After eight years of the submission of the Report, only the relatively easy-to-implement prescriptions like splitting of the post of CMD and formation of BBB werepromptly pushed, sidestepping the hard and onerous ones.  Again, the same proclivity to push easy part of reform package, and avoiding the difficult ones, was seen in the implementation of power reforms.

In 2015, Ujjwal DiscomAssurance Yojana (UDAY) was launched to make financially stressed power distribution companies (DISCOMs) stand on their own feet. Under the scheme,States were to take over 75% of DISCOM outstanding debts to improve the fiscal health of the latter. Clearly, the transfer of debt burden was the soft part of the implementation of the scheme. Whatwas critical and essential was that DISCOMs were required to reduce Aggregate Technical and Commercial (AT&C) losses, eliminate Average Cost of Supply (ACS) and Average Revenue Realized (ARR) gap,Feeder Metering, among others. Sadly, while the easy part- debt transfer-of the package was promptlyimplemented,as all DISCOMs got on board and utilised the facility of debt transfer to the State governments, most DISCOMs gave the implementation of the critical part-that is ensuring efficiency- a short shrift. The two illustrations cited above, show how by not facing the challenging part of implementation, be it in Banking or Power, have shaken confidence of both the sectors and has made progressive and sustainable change so elusive. The pitfalls of taking easy routes and avoiding discomfort of facing challenging tasks are serious, particularly in the domain of public policy and governance. Any piecemeal, half- hearted, and hasty implementationsnot only severely affect efficiency and competitiveness but also, as a result, risk huge drain of scarce resources of the nation, including tax-payers money.

(The writer is a former bank executive and author. The views expressed are personal.)