Long road ahead

THE United Progressive Alliance government, like its first avatar and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government before it, professes great concern for the building of highways and roads, seeing them, quite rightly, as drivers of economic development. But the record of the Ministry of Road Transport & Highways in the first UPA government was disappointing, to put it mildly, under the stewardship of T.R. Baalu, who changed the Chairman of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) frequently.

The present Minister, Kamal Nath, has made brave promises about the thousands of kilometres of highways he plans to build every year, but one has to see how much of those thousands will actually come up. More importantly, questions still remain about the quality and standards of the highways. Will they become the pot-holed disasters one is so familiar with after every monsoon, when the only vehicles that can negotiate them are SUVs, as used in the hinterland of Africa? Or will they be reasonably well-constructed roads that can withstand the rains and, more to the point, the heavily overloaded trucks that use them?

From what one has been able to gather, the Golden Quadrilateral, the very first of the projects to have been undertaken by the NDA government, is still to be completed. There is a stretch of some 10 miles (16 kilometres) or so in Bihar where land acquisition has still not been done or where there is some impediment to the work. Facile explanations are given, for example, that 97.6 per cent of the work has been completed. The question is, Has the project been completed or not? The simple answer is no.

Apart from these questions something else is stirring in the NHAI and it concerns the selection of the Chairman. The Minister in the previous government could change the Chairman because at that time the Chairman was nominated by the Government of India. Such appointments must never be left to the government, which means the Minister, and especially so in a coalition government, where one of the main tasks of the Prime Minister is to keep the coalition partners pleased. (If while doing so he also gets in a bit of good governance, so much the better.)

The Inter-Ministerial Committee of Parliament (IMC) set up to examine the working of the NHAI recommended that a search committee be set up to select persons suitable for the post of Chairman of the NHAI, and this was done. Despite the IMC's recommendation that the retirement age of the Chairman be 62 years, somewhere along the way it was changed to 65 years, and that was when the fun and games started.

The first search committee was scrapped on the grounds that it did not have the right people in it, and the second had to be scrapped because it was discovered that one of the applicants was himself a member of the search committee. Another applicant, it turned out, was the Secretary of the Ministry, the very person whose responsibility it is to process the recommendations of the search committee. To date no new search committee has been formed, and it is not clear whether the two gentlemen in question have withdrawn their applications or been disqualified.

Going a little beyond the bizarre facts, one needs to ask why there is this frenzied desire to get this post. It is unlikely that any of those who applied were motivated by a genuine anxiety to transform the state of India's road system, build world-class highways and take India into a new era of economic prosperity. As far as the civil servants who applied are concerned, their eagerness is easily explained. They get five more years of service, that is, five more years in which they can enjoy the consequence and the self-importance of a government post.

What about the others who have applied? Some of them may know something of how the NHAI works, but none of them is known to be a distinguished technocrat like E. Sreedharan, who won his laurels by building the Konkan Railway and who is now the Managing Director of Delhi Metro, which he built into one of the finest metro systems in the world. These applicants have not done anything to draw the admiring attention of people; good journeyman technocrats is what they are. So why do they want a job that may well be more taxing than the ones handled by Sreedharan? Clearly, for roughly the same reasons as the civil servants and, dare one say it, because they know where the loopholes in the various systems are. Some of the loopholes were outlined in a poignant letter that the late S.K. Dubey wrote to the Prime Minister, but these were at a relatively low level; there must be many more loopholes higher up the ladder. The hopefuls may well use this knowledge to plug the loopholes, which would be a good thing. But one wonders whether their eagerness for the job is indeed to plug those loopholes and ensure transparency in all of the NHAI's dealings.

One thing is clear. One does not need a civil servant as Chairman. Civil servants simply do not know how highways are built, where the systems need to be altered, improved or replaced altogether. A Chairman must have been involved at some stage in the actual building of a road. Sitting in an office with spreadsheets and statistics is no substitute.

So if it has to be a technocrat, how does one get someone like Sreedharan? The only way is to look at the applicants' track records and pick the one who has the best. A rigorous scrutiny of the background of each short-listed candidate for honesty is essential, but is something that is almost never done, and those with the slightest odour of something dubious about them must be rejected immediately.

Going a little further, one must consider the manner in which appointments to key positions are made. As in this case, the absolute discretion of Ministers must be removed and replaced with a system in which they are just a part of the selection process and cannot in any circumstances have lawfully appointed incumbents removed only because they do not want them there. True, the Minister is accountable to Parliament, but accountability in the political discourse has been redefined successfully and the argument no longer holds water.