By W. Synrem
Another plenary session of the North Eastern Council (NEC) is just round the corner. It is, therefore, time for the people of this region to reflect on the extent to which the NEC has been able to realize the goals and objectives for which it has been set up and what more needs to be done in the context of reverberating socio-political and economic changes affecting everybody in our present-day globalised world. The North Eastern Council was born out of political expediency as well as necessity consequent upon the reorganization of the North Eastern States in 1971. The then composite State of Assam failed to effectively meet the growing aspirations of ethnic and linguistic groups especially those of the Khasis, the Jaintias, the Garos and the Mizos and taking into account the then prevailing circumstances, the Govt. of India deemed it propitious to reorganize the region basically on linguistic considerations into five States and two Union Territories. The five States were Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Tripura while the two Union Territories were Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram. Later on, both Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram also became full-fledged States and now an eighth State has also been added, viz. Sikkim.
Although politically the region was split into seven units, economically it was felt that the region should be looked at as a single unit from the point of view of economic viability. This led to the creation of the North Eastern Council (NEC) which was supposed to deal with matters of common economic interests of two or more States of the region. For instance it was not considered feasible at that time for each State of the region to have its own medical college or its own engineering college. Hence a Regional Medical College (subsequently renamed as Regional Institute of Medical Sciences) was set up at Imphal and the North Eastern Regional Institute of Science and Technology (NERIST) was set up at Nirjuli in Arunachal Pradesh and the total number of seats was divided among the States as per mutually agreed laid down criteria. A number of other regional institutes also came up over the years which served more or less satisfactorily well the interest of these economically unviable States of this region. The construction of inter-State roads and inter-State power transmission lines was also an area of commendable achievement by NEC. Power generation projects and airports were other critical infrastructure projects that were taken up by the NEC as per its broad mandate to bring about balanced development of the region.
It can thus be seen that NEC is supposed to look at things from a macro-level perspective and ensure that all States of the region get their due and fair share of benefit out of NEC funded projects. However, problems started cropping up when NEC took up some micro-level beneficiary-oriented schemes and projects which considerably diluted its original mandate. It should have been understood that NEC’s entry into activities that State Governments are better placed to undertake could lead to not only frittering of scarce resources but also to lack of effective supervision over those small and widely scattered projects located in remote and inaccessible areas resulting in negligible outcomes and impacts. NEC has neither unlimited resources nor adequate manpower to embark upon activities which the States themselves are better qualified to take up.
In course of time, it looked like NEC started to increasingly lose sight of the big picture and the distinctive nature of its activities got considerably eroded to such an extent that NEC projects became just add-ons and appendages to State plans and programmes. As a result, most of NEC’s notable achievements were pre-1999-2000 when NEC was under MHA whereas after 2000-2001 with the coming into existence of the M/o DoNER very few projects came up that could be called iconic for which NEC can justifiably claim due credit. Hence, this calls for sincere introspection on the part of all concerned because scarce resources of the region have to be put to their most productive uses and should not be just squandered irresponsibly and injudiciously without due regard for long term outcomes. There has been a lot of talk on infrastructure deficit, lack of quality education, skill development and employment generation, Act East Policy and what not. These should be followed up logically by concrete action plans as otherwise this region cannot hope to catch up with the rest of the country and socio-economic imbalances are, therefore, bound to persist and aggravate.
One important issue over which there is absolutely no scope for disagreement even from NEC’s side is that the NEC Secretariat is presently suffering from a acute shortage of officers. In the absence of such officers who are supposed to be technically highly qualified since both the line Ministries of the Govt. of India and the State Governments are supposed to give due regard to their expert views and advice, the functional effectiveness of the NEC Secretariat has naturally become an area of grave concern. It should be noted that the number of sanctioned technical posts in the NEC Secretariat is very small. In spite of that, there has hardly been a time when all the posts were filled up. Besides, most of the officers are stand-alone officers with nobody to assist them at the middle level except for ministerial staff. Whenever vacancies occur, these were given as additional charge to whoever the head of the organization may like simply because he or she may be the only one available notwithstanding his or her lack of domain expertise.
Given this state of affairs, it is felt that the NEC secretariat is really ill-equipped to absorb more funds or to take up additional responsibilities for ensuring the accelerated development of this region. Under these circumstances, there is a veritable limit to what NEC can do. It should be noted, however, that NEC does not directly implement any project. NEC projects are implemented mainly by either State Governments or Central Govt. agencies but they have to be first technically scrutinized and vetted by the NEC domain experts who also have to provide technical inputs from time to time during their various phases of implementation. Hence, it should be understood that most of the NEC’s officers are already overburdened as of now and their capacity to cope with additional responsibilities is, humanly speaking, justifiably questionable.
There is an internal Staffing Needs Committee under the chairmanship of the Secretary, M/o DoNER which was charged with the task of looking into the actual manpower requirements of NEC Secretariat but so far the Committee has not met even once and it is, therefore, questionable if the Govt. of India is really seriously interested in effectively strengthening the NEC Secretariat for enabling it to take up more responsibilities as clamoured and articulated from time to time. Talking about the organizational structure of NEC Secretariat, it should be borne in mind that NEC was originally envisaged to be an advisory body as per the NEC Act of 1971 but in the NEC (Amendment) Act of 2002 its role was changed into that of a regional planning body. It should be apparent that with the change of role, more manpower is needed. Besides, the NEC Secretariat had also been taking up a number of incidental activities in furtherance of its aims and objectives for which necessary budgetary allocations had been placed at its disposal. While opinions may differ on whether the NEC had been able to effectively discharge its assigned role as mandated by the original Act and the amendment Act, the fact remains that it is a unique entity for which a new vision has been envisaged by the Prime Minister himself during his address to the 65th NEC Plenary in May 2016. Hence, everything has to be worked out accordingly and the organization should be empowered to fulfill its mandated role.
Another problem of serious proportion confronting the NEC Secretariat is the inordinately large number of on-going projects vis-à-vis its meager annual budgetary allocation. This problem was sought to be circumvented by resorting to closure of projects with time overrun of more than two years on an “as is where is” basis with a stipulation that the concerned implementing agencies should complete the projects out of their own resources. There is, however, no concrete or fool-proof mechanism to ensure that such projects would be eventually completed within reasonable timeframe. Hence, the likelihood is that investment already made may just become infructuous with nobody being held accountable for the likely colossal waste of public funds. This is especially true of non-infrastructure projects about which even the percentage of achievement cannot be determined with any degree of precision or accuracy.
Whether this state of affairs can be attributed to NEC’s trying to bite more than it can chew given its skeletal manpower strength and meager budgetary resources is a moot point but it undeniably reflects poorly on the quality of project scrutiny, the quality of project implementation and the present capacity of the organization to really come up to the level of expectation of the people who may still be looking at it as an organization that can do wonders notwithstanding its uninspiring performance of late which belies that kind of expectation unless its present malady is correctly diagnosed and effectively remedied. Taking everything into consideration, proper coordination among the line Ministries, the NEC and the State Governments is, therefore, the supreme need of the hour for taking the region forward. The resultant better synergy of efforts should help in accelerating the actualization of the goals of balanced regional development and enabling the States of the region to play a more significant role especially in the context of the Govt. of India’s Act East Policy.
(The writer is a retired Additional Secretary level officer of the Govt. of India)