Government is much more than contracts and military expansion

Amar Yumnam *

In our republic we attach great importance to the speeches of the President and the Governors for they reflect collective mind of the Government.

So since the times are critical as they are, we do read between the lines the addresses of the Governors of our State with great enthusiasm and whatever critical scrutiny we can muster. It is with the same spirit that we have read the latest edition of the Governor's speech to the State Assembly.

Reading the speech one cannot help feeling that the State has a long way to go and lots of visionary revisions before she ever possesses a listening and thinking Government. It has long been emphasized through both regional and global experience that security forces alone can never secure a country; require as they are the factors fostering and nurturing a nation are something else.

The Contrary: But on the contrary, what the State has witnessed over the last decade or so is nothing but expansion of the security forces. The State has been generating employment only in her police force to such an extent to have a salient impact on the educational scenario of the land.

Now every youth looks forward to employment in the State police or paramilitary forces the moment one passes the twelfth standard; the zeal for higher education the State proudly had till recently has been nearly killed. This is a rather unfortunate outcome.

The other significant negative impact this would have on the economy also needs to be highlighted. The importance of the police force in sustaining a society can never be overemphasised, but the trouble lies if it happens to be the only expanding sector in an economy.

Recent spate of increasing involvement of personnel of the security forces in extortions cannot be without a logic of its own. But the point I wish to emphasise relates to the dynamics of an economy where only the security forces expand.

Important as they are, we must realize that security personnel serve no directly productive purpose. Such expansions only distort the structural relationships in the economy, particularly in the cases like Manipur's. This would make the economy increasingly demand driven without appropriately expanding the supply capacity of the economy.

Further if we continue with the present trend, in about one and a half decade we are to bound face fiscal crisis in the State once again due to the increasing share we are spending on the expansion of the State security forces.

Governance as Contracts:

The other feature coming out very prominently from the latest address in the State Assembly is the mindset of the State Government which sees everything as contract; it is as if contract is governance and governance is contract for the Government of this State.

What gets fundamentally repeated in emphasis in the speech is the execution of the various contract works in the State. There is no reflection of any exercise of mind of the State Government on how it plans to address the core issue of governance facing this part of the nation.

Before I come to the contents of the speech, I would like to give a latest intervention of the State Government as an example of its non-application of mind. It relates to the order to get clearance certificate of electricity bills for any employee of the government to enjoy receiving salary.

It is absolute nonsense on many counts. First, it just creates another room for rent-seeking by the staff of the concerned department.

Secondly, it reflects how the State government discounts the value of time. The place for collection of certificate is very different and far away from the place where the consumers pay the bills. The consumer time being wasted in the process is the time of the Government.

I understand that the Government talks often of increasing application of information technology in its process of administration. A more sensible and contemporaneously right would be to collect the electricity consumer numbers of the various employees.

It would be more economical and the realization of dues more instantaneous without any room for rent seeking if there is networking among the various departments so that the payments could be checked online.

This way any due could immediately be realised from the salary of the employee and deposited to the account of the electricity department without in any way disturbing the normal function of any of the departments.

The other example is from the latest speech of the head of the State we have referred earlier. As I have said earlier, the orientation towards contracts of the State Government is very blatantly evident from the speech. Let me just take one example.

Of late, including the present speech, the State Government has been talking of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNRUM). But what is most unfortunately missing in all these is the absence of any reference to the improvement in governance which is a fundamental component in the project.

Upshot: The upshot of my argument is that improvement in the quality of governance has long been ignored by the State Government and we have started paying the price for it.

The time is already overdue for the government to apply its mind to governance above everything else.