PM Narendra Modi wants results, not plans

Disappointed with routine presentations, the Prime Minister’s Office has asked department secretaries to specify how they would link each paisa the government invested to the outcome for benefit of the people.

Updated on: Jun 23, 2014, 15:21:52 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Link government spending to the pay-off: that’s the message from Prime Minister Narendra Modi for department secretaries.

Disappointed with routine presentations, the Prime Minister’s Office has asked department secretaries to specify how they would link each paisa the government invested to the outcome for benefit of the people.

Modi, apparently, was not very impressed with initial demonstrations made before him by secretaries, as they only indicated their ministries’ mandate and vision. Most of the presentations talked about the departments’ plans and proposals for the next 100 days, but not the impact. The PM was more interested in learning the outcome of the proposals and how the ministries intend to measure this. “He wants results of every paisa the government spends and the statistical measurement,” a secretary-level official in the government said.

The administration has been grappling with a system to measure upshot of public outlay. The UPA government, under finance minister P Chidambaram, had come out with an outcome budget for two years, but discontinued the practice after facing criticism that the reports didn’t indicate how the expenditure had changed lives of people.

Modi, however, is keen that ministries measure outcome with May 2014 as the base as promised by him in BJP Parliamentary Party meeting.

The official added that all the secretaries have been asked to tweak their presentations to include a specific component on measureable outcome. “If a new scheme is being proposed, the secretaries have to state how many people it would benefit,” he said. The secretaries have also been told to give a timeline.

This has caught some functionaries off-guard, as none of the ministries have a system to measure the change government expenditure brings to lives of beneficiaries.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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