India Backbone Implementation Network: Civil Services Mentor Magazine June 2013

India has many popular movements uniting citizens against what they do not want: of which corruption is a principal element. The country also needs movements to unite citizens for what they want in their habitats and their lives, and to enable them to work together to create it. The nascent IBIN is a movement for co-creating our worlds.

India is a country with no full stops, Mark Tully observed. And in India, no decision is final, the finance minister lamented at the Planning Commission’s meeting to approve the 12th Plan. During the Planning Commission’s consultations with stakeholders for preparing the Plan, citizens had said they were fed up with foundation stones strewn across the country by political leaders yearning for the limelight. They  want more ‘finishing stones’. The sputtering of India’s economic growth rate has rung alarm bells for economists and rating agencies. India must attract more private investments in infrastructure and industry. Though attracted by the potential of India’s market, investors are turned off by the difficulties of getting things done in the country. Projects are stuck in tardy processes of approval and snarled in inter- epartmental wrangles.

Consequently, India remains towards the bottom of evaluations of countries for ease-of-doing business. The FM has urged Indian PSUs, who have large balance sheets, to get on with capital investments to kick-start revival of the economy. The chiefs of India’s PSUs say they have intentions to invest but cannot implement them. Recently, they met the PM and explained their difficulties. Their projects are stuck in ministerial red tape at the Centre and lost within jungles of uncoordinated processes in the states. Very poor coordination amongst agencies, poor implementation and leaky delivery systems are also the root causes of the unsatisfactory state of India’s health, education and other public services.

There is a widespread need in India to convert confusion into coordination, contention into collaboration, and intention into implementation. Easier said than done, many say. It is our ‘culture’ to be argumentative, they explain. And democracy makes it difficult to get people to work together, they add. If only we had a dictator for a decade to get growth going and then we can get back to democracy, some wistfully dream. Of course, they have no solution for how a widely-accepted dictator will quickly and peacefully emerge! There has to be a democratic alternative to dictatorship for discipline. In a highly diverse as well as democratic country, such as India, consensus is required for all stakeholders to move together, forward and faster. This consensus cannot be commanded. We need another mechanism specifically designed to bring people with different perspectives together: to listen to one another, to distil the essence of their shared aspiration for their habitation or their organisation, and adopt the critical principles they will adhere to in the work they must do together. A model of a process for rapidly improving a nation’s capabilities to get things done systematically and democratically is available in the Total Quality Movement (TQM) in Japan. In less than two decades, Japan, that had a reputation for poor quality and low-cost products, became the international benchmark of quality in many industries and several of its public services too.