Help! Government schemes are being choked by corruption

When you circle the wagons and decide to strike with pinpoint accuracy, you suddenly find that the target itself has turned to vapour.

In a nation where corruption and cronyism appear to be coming out of every pore, its odour all pervasive, big budget government schemes are riven with this distasteful practice.

Slippages, leakages and ingenious 
ways of stealing a highway robbery
 have often been the bane of welfare
 schemes in India. While the much pub
licised Comptroller and Auditor General 
(CAG) tracks the rupee in its capacity as an
adjunct of the Public Accounts Committee
 (PAC) of Parliament, the exercise is always post
facto and extremely contentious as we now know.
 Figures bandied about as presumptive losses have
 seen governments fall, the hyperbole shaking the foundations of the executive. There may well be excessive chat
ter about the chasm that exists between subjectivity and objectivity, but what cannot be discounted is the fact that India’s government schemes are full of holes.

One can argue that figures like Rs 176,000 crore and Rs 186,000 crore, were way over the top, but they were based on differing methodologies. Subsequent events like government conducted auctions and Supreme Court verdicts have proved that malafide and malfeasance existed. At the core of India’s planning apparatus are budgetary allocations, largesse showered on states, its people and what have you. These budgets have come attached with outcomes, without a tracking system which tells you where the rupee is placed on the food chain. Oh, India is too vast, how can an exercise so cumbersome be conducted? It is called software with a brutal pinch of honesty thrown in. Software is easy to come by, but honesty is at a premium in a land where new ways are being devised every minute to make easy money. Human ingenuity has no bounds when the system is so opaque and yet porous for it allows you to skim it at all times. An anachronism – yes. Truly Indian jugaad – maybe.

Look at R K Chandolia who was A Raja’s assistant in Sanchar Bhawan, he conjured a scam out of thin air. Virtually, given that air waves were handed out on a first come first served basis in a spectacle of cronyism, which earned ridicule from the whole world.

Failure

I would like to illustrate this abomination with two very recent examples. They are the embodiment of what I have written, but more so typify why India suffers from a peculiar infrastructure deficit. CAG merely holds a mirror to your face, it tells you where you have failed, but as I said, it’s all done after the horse has bolted. A mechanism to know in real time, how and where the government rupee is going, is lacking. The CAG report on implementation of Public Private Partnership (PPP) Projects in the National Highways Authority of India, is a case in point. Placed in Parliament on December 22, it points out how NHAI failed to achieve the target of 20km per day during 2009-10 to 2012-13. NHAI’s best achievement was 17.81km per day during 2011-12 which dropped to a mere 3.06km per day during 2012-13. Then we grumble over how roads and highway development has come to a standstill. Worse still, during this period, the actual length of national highways awarded was 16,037km, as against the revised work plan of 42,391km, adopted by the ministry.

Non-achievement of the target led to huge cash balances with NHAI. The NHAI raised funds of Rs 10,000 crore in 2011-12 and out of the surplus funds available with it, the NHAI parked it in fixed deposits with banks Rs 9,928.31 crore as on March 31, 2012 and Rs 5,933.59 crore as on March 31, 2013. Even as we are grappling with paucity of capital to fund our road and highway development programme, the NHAI was busy earning interest on funds raised, but not deployed. Now, this is a staggering lapse. We grumble about lack of infrastructure roll outs. What we now know is that the highway buildout fell down from 17km a day to a pathetic three km daily. And NHAI had funds available sitting in the bank in fixed deposits which were gathering interest but not used to build roads. Appaling, but does anyone care?

Upgradation

NHAI isn’t a bank to sit on huge cash balances, its job is to fund highways and build them out. CAG tells us that the Government lost the opportunity to earn tax revenue to the extent of Rs 135.87 crore. This is considering the corporate tax rate of 32.45 per cent on surplus money, invested in fixed deposits at the rate of 9.85 per cent per annum, out of funds borrowed through tax free bonds. The funds were raised to finance road projects, not earn a rate of return from bank deposits.

So, the NHAI in the last four years of UPA rule, actually transformed itself into a bank.

Here is another nugget of information, I found buried in the CAG report which defies all laws of reason – audit analysed selection of stretches on the basis of traffic data available on the website of the Ministry. It was noticed that 16 stretches in nine States having comparatively higher traffic volume, were ignored for upgradation, with other stretches were selected instead. The CAG also found that 42 road stretches, once approved by Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure (CCI) under the National Highways Development Project (NHDP) were substituted without justification for 26 new road stretches, who took the approval of CCI subsequently. This is clearly a theatre of the absurd.

If you are a glutton for more punishment, here is even more juice about why we aren’t getting it right. Indira Awas Yojana, a major scheme of the Government of India, which provides low cost housing to BPL families, brought out shocking shortcomings in its implementation. While an expenditure above Rs 60, 239 crore was incurred during the period 2008 to 2013, the scheme failed to achieve its targets in providing houses to the intended beneficiaries. A sample check carried out in about 4,800 villages in 168 districts across the country, where it was seen that over Rs 140 crore was given to individuals outside the waiting lists maintained by the authorities. Also, around 37,000 houses were made ineligible for Above Poverty Line (APL) recipients, along with several cases of multiple payments made in respect of beneficiaries already owning pucca houses. Other lapses in the implementation of the scheme, included construction through contractors, which was inadmissible, and the gross failure of the authorities to carry out the required inspections/technical supervisions for ensuring quality construction.

Convergence

The scheme, which was designed to avail the benefits of convergence through coordination with other rural electrification, water supply and sanitation schemes of the government – for the provision of adequate infrastructure in the constructed houses – failed to do so, thereby depriving the beneficiaries of adequately equipped and functional houses. Remember, the new dispensation is talking about housing for all by 2022.

All this convinces me that there is something very putrescent about us. Not only are we morally, socially and politically corrosive, but our systems and processes are decaying and amoral. How does one fix the unfixable?