Frustration of citizens with the apathy and inefficiency of India’s government institutions has been spilling into the streets. The first rallying cry was corruption. Now it is the safety of women. Police, justice, administration, and public services—institutions essential for good governance—are corroded by inefficiencies and corruption. They lack the basic grammar of good management: accountability to stakeholders, efficient use of resources, and respect for deadlines. Citizens want leaders who are not merely good politicians but good managers. Therefore chief ministers who campaign on a credible platform of good management, such as Narendra Modi and Nitish Kumar, will win elections.
While aam aurat and aam admi are protesting on the streets, the country’s economists are raising alarms about the state of the nation’s finances. They demand political will to reduce fuel subsidies, increase power tariffs, and re-engineer the food subsidy system. However, politicians without a credible record of good management, anxious to stay in power, are wary of risking more voter anger by imposing good economics on people. A root cause of India’s long brewing, now simmering, political and economic crises is bad management of public institutions and citizen services.
India has many professional politicians and many good economists. What it lacks is good management of public institutions. Good management practices relevant for India’s governance can be found in China, Malaysia, and Japan, amongst other places.
The popular perception is that things get done in China because a single strong political party enables the center to control top-down in a way that India’s political leadership cannot. The truth is that there is much greater devolution of powers to the provinces and cities in China than in India. In China, the center sets targets and gives considerable freedom to provincial and local leaders in implementation. Then it focuses on assessing outcomes, learning from the experiments, and rewarding good performers. In contrast, Indian states and cities are struggling to be rid of micromanagement from the center, one-size-fits-all solutions, and management of inputs rather than outcomes.
Large organizations, as Governments everywhere are, have perforce to be divided into more manageable parts—into ministries, programs and schemes. They generally lapse into silos and boxes, with impenetrable walls around them, making collaboration amongst the parts very difficult. Therefore processes to ensure convergence must be systematically installed and managed. In India, the approach to convergence is to kick problems to the top, which thus becomes the bottle-neck for coordination, or to attempt convergence by committees, whose recommendations are implemented desultorily if at all.
The Malaysian Government operates a system for convergence through lateral coordination, called PEMANDU—the Performance Management and Delivery Unit, whereby the stakeholders in any large issue co-create plans and fix shared responsibilities and targets. The relevant stakeholders, from industry, civil society, and government come together in ‘Laboratories’ in which they systematically analyze the national challenge together. These professionally facilitated laboratories conclude only when a best-fit plan for action is signed off by all stakeholders, which invariably happens in 9 weeks or less. The outputs of these Labs are then shared with the general public, for review and feedback, in facilitated ‘town hall’ like events called ‘Open Days’. Transparent tracking mechanisms for progress are agreed upon. Thereafter Problem Solving Meetings (PSMs) of stakeholders are convened when necessary to find solutions to roadblocks encountered.
If the key lesson from China for management of a large country is to get Local, and the key lesson from Malaysia for the management of multi-stakeholder systems is to build Lateral connections amongst stakeholders, the lesson from Japan is to institutionalize rapid, wide-spread Learning. The Total Quality Movement (TQM) transformed the capabilities of Japanese business and public sector organizations after the Second World War. TQM is an outcome-based, action-oriented, learning-driven management system. TQM tools are a grammar of good systems’ management. Applied by people at many levels in Japanese organizations, they helped to transform Japan.
The architecture of large systems’ governance, in all three examples is based on three principles—three ‘Ls’. The first ‘L’ is to devolve responsibilities and build capabilities of ‘Local’ units. The second ‘L’ is deliberate creation of ‘Lateral’ coordination processes, illustrated here in the Malaysian example. The strength of the TQM movement in Japan also was in its lateral connections. The movement ‘scaled up’ by creating forums in which many organizations, including competitors, learned from each other.
The third ‘L’ is a systematic management of the process of ‘Learning’, visible in all three examples. The test of a good learning system is its ability to learn and improve faster than others. Even poorer countries in Africa and in our neighborhood (Bangladesh), as well as other developing countries like China, Malaysia, and Indonesia, have improved social indicators faster than us. We have a lot to learn about how to learn.
In conclusion, we should stop making the country’s size, federal structure, and democracy explanations for poor governance and tardy implementation of projects. India’s governance needs a strong dose of good management. We must learn to get things done.