Big Business or Big Government?

During the full-term government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee flying NDA/BJP colours, one could overhear from the corridors of Parliament House and big media houses murmurs intoning that “it’s not the government’s business to be in business’.And a determined effort to shed the gigantic load of various public sector enterprises had started.A ministry eerily anticipating the title of an Arundhati Roy novel, ‘ministry of disinvestment’ was going great guns.These days we witness  such disinvestment in full swing.Oddly the trend now is not only to shrug off burdens of industry and business,but off-load just any kind of public investment,including welfare services and public responsibilities like education and health-care.In the dogged dogmatic campaign even sound profit-making enterprises went under the hammer and serious public welfare projects were gravely compromised.

One common libertarian argument had been that a government burdened with too many responsibilities just becomes too big and turns into a bureaucratic machine oppressing the hapless citizen.Actually the fault was not in the bigness and weight of scale,but the nature of the relationship that turns the citizen into a powerless victim.In stead of meeting that problem the very idea of public responsibility of the government has been junked.And business enterprises geared solely to sheer profit-making and without even the figleaf of accountability have been given the authority to control matters with life and death implications for the ordinary citizens.

In my home town,now a bustling bristling mess of a growing city where every moment some sections of population face serious stress thanks to uncoordinated construction on a gigantic scale and frantic but desultory pace and a casual attitude to all civic responsibilities.Now it is an elderly woman swept away to a sorry end by a ferocious jet of water from a leaking pipe left untended,and now it is two hapless laborers smashed into pulp by collapse of an overhanging girder of a flyover under construction.Parts of the river we had grown up with and like an artery of our collective life has been blocked from view and the river-bank handed over to a businessman(reportedly Jay Shah who is also rumoured to have acquired huge landed property in and around the city) for exploiting as an entertainment park.’Outsourcing’ is the buzzword to explain the calamity.

This phenomenon, and the mentality behind it,go to explain national man-made calamities that hit blazing headlines in media for days together.Let us attend to some facts about the terrible recent accident that led to the instant death of 10  passengers and serious injury to  one hundred and forty odd victims.The actual extent of the trauma caused will never be exactly known.The impact was so horrendous that photographs of the scene show several compartments of a speeding train mounted on top of the rear of another.Apparently the automatic signaling system having stalled, the driver of the Kanchenjangha Express received signals to slow down by another method called paper signalling while the goods train that followed received apparently none. Incidentally the driver and the fireman of the speeding goods train lost their lives as a result of the collision.

The New Indian Express had carried a newsreport about a letter dated 28th June, 2023 from All India Railway Engineers’ Federation to the then railway Minister urging him to abandon the system of outsourcing critical functions like maintenance and repair of signalling apparatus and tracks as well as overhanging structures to private firms.They maintained that permanent engineers and trained supervisors should be employed to carry out such important services.There are large numbers of vacancies in such regular posts.

They had some blunt remarks on desirability of outsourcing such services,as in their words the private firms were manned by raw engineering recruits who neither had the seasoned skill nor accountability to serve in such delicate and critical capacities.Somewhat obscurely they also went on to demand that junior engineers entrusted with such tasks be banned from “trade union activities”,probably suggesting that such irresponsibility resulted from trade union activities.This is a rather strange insinuation, perhaps calculated to win over the BJP Minister with partisan views about trade unions. However the crux of their eminently rational plea is stopping the ruinous practice of outsourcing.

Since business firms are dogmatically believed to be more efficient than government departments,critical technical functions galore are being outsourced with disastrous results from time to time.Such had been the case with British Rail soon after privatization.What is more, in the recent past several such major accidents leading to hundreds of casualties have taken place owing to failure of the signal system.But the railway ministry seems determined not to see reason.

Observers closely following the developments in the railways have also claimed that in line with the NDA government’s obsession with squeezing money out of every service the Railway Ministry has concentrated on developing money-spinning trains like Bande Bharat Express at the expense of other existing trains that are poorly maintained,even though they carry the bulk of the passengers and goods.

The kind of business ethos that developed during colonial rule,marked by contempt for the customer,rampant evasion of rules and standards and adulteration and corruption are now spreading alarmingly to other newly devised stand-alone government agencies.The Union Government seems obsessed with centralization and standardization of every government function to the total neglect of the States’ rights.From tax collection to conducting entrance examination to universities,medical and engineering colleges.The business model is followed here too.Hence the high and ever rising fees for such examinations.

Then the casual manner in which the scripts are handled and scored.Corruption occurs in a systematic and organized fashion.There are staggering reports that some students are prepared to pay as much as one crore and more for such corrupt deals for good results.Ministers and MPs are said to get a cut out of such deals.One wonders if the now forgotten ‘Vyapam’ scandal of Madhya Pradesh had paved the way for such public rackets.NTA is an autonomous agency floated by the NDA government to conduct various all India examinations and tests on the lines of a business firm and charging ever increasing fees for such ” efficient corruption-free services”.The Supreme Court has read the rule-book to NTA sternly but has not ordered a strict inquiry on the scam.

It seems that while it is not the business of the government to be in business,it is all right to surrender the functions and  services of the government to business,lock stock and barrel.While government is supposed to have disengaged from business, one is aghast at the silent take-over of government by business.

Hiren Gohain is a political commentator