Patricia Mukhim
The question we all ask is why governance fails in Meghalaya. But that’s a silly question. Governance fails because people running the government want it to fail. It’s as simple as that! Those who want governance to succeed should all get copies of the Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India on State Finances and the Revenue Sector. We only need to go through the findings of the CAG to see that government itself is the biggest violator of all the norms of good governance. Let me cite a few examples.
Weighbridges that are meant to be installed for raising revenue for the state are used instead by politicians and their business cronies to make money on the sly, never mind if the economy of the state is in tatters. Sample this clear case of mis-governance commonly known as ‘corruption.’ The CAG observation vis-à-vis Transport Department: Delay in issuing instructions for weighing trucks carrying limestone resulted in loss of revenue due to non-realisation of penalty amounting to Rs 10.51 crore on overloading. This is just a pittance. If anyone digs deeper they will find out who actually is the kingpin running the weighbridges across the state. They are sitting in the State Secretariat. Holy cow! How do we deal with that! And what’s more, the police are handpicked to carry out the orders of their masters. So more than policing, police officers posted in the coal and limestone rich areas are doing the rent-seeking for their political masters. This is why our collective faith in the policing system is diminishing by the day. The DGP is unable to stand up to the orders of his minister. Similarly the Chief Secretary is unable to prevent the arbitrary transfer of his young officers! This is the State we live in today. Those who know these dirty secrets find it depressing or opt to work out of the state. Good for them!
In the Forest and Environment Sector the CAG report says a performance review on Wildlife and Forest Management in Meghalaya covering the period 2012-13 to 2016-17 reveals a number of deficiencies in the function of the Department. Encroachment in the Reserved Forests continues unabated. As of March 2017, the total encroached forest area was 8600.51 hectares. To save face and for top honchos of the Forest Department to justify their pay and perks, the Department filed 1223 court cases for encroachment. However, not a single case has resulted in a verdict. Illegal felling of timber and illegal extraction of minerals is widespread. There are 348 unlicensed/illegal saw mills operating in the State. The Department of course makes a show of closing them down permanently but never succeeds because palms are regularly greased. The National Green Tribunal (NGT) which has the teeth of a court has directed a ban on coal mining, extraction of sand from river beds and felling of timber etc. But the Department did not maintain data on minerals transported during the ban period; hence it was not in a position to verify if there was illegal transportation. But we all know that sand continues to be mined; quarries continue to be worked without regulations and coal is still mined and transported because police facilitate this instead of halting it.
Interestingly there is a dual control in collection of royalty on limestone by the Forest and Mining Department without any system for exchange of information between the two. So the transporters/companies have a field day evading royalty. This is how governance happens right at the source of revenue collection.
The CAG found that “the Forest Department did not exercise control and monitor the activities of the field offices effectively. Vital information such as the progress of court cases relating to illegal saw mills, royalty and cess collected by Mining Department was not available with the Forest Department, thereby hindering it in effectively tackling the menace of illegal felling and removal of timber or protecting its revenue interests. The data on encroachment maintained by field offices was unreliable. Moreover the Forest Department did not have a suitable control and monitoring mechanism in place to prevent unauthorized transport of forest minerals. Hence four forest check-gates under-reported transportation of 141.29 lakh MT of limestone resulting in loss of revenue amounting to Rs 99.49 crore.”
The Mining and Geology Department is of course notorious for failing to mop up revenue for the State. There is regular under-reporting of coal exported to Bangladesh. This resulted in revenue loss of Rs 46.41 crore. Wonder how much of that went to the DMR officials manning the check gates. The same Department failed to realize royalty amounting to Rs 51.78 crore on 7.67 lakh MT of assessed coal.
Most importantly the Taxation Department which is the revenue earning Department of the State is also the Department with the highest leakage. In 2016-17 a test check of 19 units found that there was under-assessment of tax and other irregularities in 203 cases involving a whopping Rs 471 crore. These leakages continue with the errant Departments explaining away their acts of omission and commission. Now the point about CAG reports is that they should be diligently studied by the MLAs especially by those sitting in the Opposition. But we know that hardly happens. Politicians are too busy with their businesses and their selfish interests to bother with the CAG report
Another reason for poor governance is that there is a huge chasm between the government and the people who should actually be the primary stakeholders in the governance process. We may call ourselves a democracy but people don’t have a say in governance yet. Women especially are nowhere to be seen in decision-making platforms in the villages. When they attend meetings, women are largely silent spectators who leave the decision making to men. And we call ourselves a matriliny! And this matriliny is glorified across the world.
Look around the city of Shillong and at the number of women hawkers. They outnumber men. Why? It’s because most of those women who brave the sun and rain to peddle their wares, do so because they have to feed families. Most are single parents. While we are angry at the fact that these hawkers have taken over our footpaths, none of us are angry with the Government which is yet to come up with an Act that gives these hawkers some dignity and a proper place to be in rather than having to run away for cover the moment a storm brews. That the last Government has failed to legislate a law premised on the Street Vendors Act 2014 is not easily understood. What are the sticking points in the Act that the Meghalaya Government fears?
The point of this article is to point out the loopholes in governance that are allowed to continue and why they are allowed to continue. Paul Light of the Brookings Institution lists five categories of causes for governance failure. They are (a) policy (b) resources (c) structure (d) leadership (e) culture. These occur because of multiple causes coming together and compounding the situation. Light details how each type of cause contributed to government failures. His findings paint the picture of a government at high risk for serious, repeated, and frequent failure in its attempt to deliver policy.
Paul Light writes further, “the first step in preventing future failures is to find a reasonable set of past failures that might yield lessons for repair.” To meet this goal, Light asks four key questions about past government failures: (1) where did government fail, (2) why did government fail, (3) who caused the failures, and (4) what can be done to fix the underlying problems?
The contributors to failure fall into five categories, Light concludes:
1 Policy: Government might not have been given the policy, or any policy at all, needed to solve the problem at hand; or the policy might have been either too difficult to deliver or delegated to a vulnerable or historically unreliable organization.
- Resources:Government might not have had enough funding, staff, or the “collateral capacity” such as information technology, oversight systems, or technical experience to deliver consistent policy impact.
- Structure:Government might have been unable to move information up and down its over-layered chain of command, select and supervise its contractors, or resolve the confusion associated with duplication and overlap.
- Leadership:Government’s top appointees might have been unqualified to lead; could have made poor decisions before, during, and after the failures appeared; or might have taken their posts after long delays.
- Culture:Government might have created confusing missions that could not be communicated and embraced, were easily undermined by rank corruption and unethical conduct, or were beyond careful monitoring through performance measurement and management.
Paul Light’s paper deserves serious reading by those in the present Government who, hopefully, do not want to repeat past mistakes. But I would stick my neck out and say that a complete reshuffle in the top bureaucracy is called for rather than tinkering with mid-career bureaucrats, especially in Departments where some officials have developed a vested interest by virtue of being there for decades. Isn’t that an important rule of governance? More often these officials are the problem for they have violated every norm of good governance.