This Sunday the Government reshuffled its deck of ministerial cards and got all ramped up for a new game of poker. Governance is always a gamble after all. While we saw the addition of some new faces in the Cabinet, we saw some old ones being dropped. More interestingly, some existing ministers were ‘promoted’, so to speak. (Complete list)

This week, let’s do a performance review of three ministers who were ‘promoted’ and try to find out why they were rewarded with additional portfolios. But before we do that, let’s talk a little bit about the novel new way which the Modi government is structuring its cabinet. For that, we need to understand the difference between Cabinet Minister, Minister with Independent Charge and Minister of State.

Council of Ministers

Cabinet Minister: A person who leads a Ministry and is called in to take a larger policy decision regarding his/her Ministry is a Cabinet Minister. These ministers don’t exactly have to report to the Prime Minister and can take their own decisions. They’re a part of the ‘Cabinet’, meaning they are the topmost advisors and executors in the Government. They assemble, every once a while, to clear and assent important legislations, rules and also advise the Prime Minister on various issues of strategic value.

Minister with Independent Charge: These ministers are not a part of the cabinet. They are not summoned when legislations are approved and major policy decisions are taken. However, they have been given ‘independent charge’ of a particular Ministry, meaning they are allowed to take decisions in their domain. They don’t strictly report to any senior cabinet Minister, but the Prime Minister can haul them up every now and then to check the progress of their work.

Minister of State: A person who is a Minister of State (MoS) has to report to a senior Cabinet Minister and is not a part of the Cabinet. They have to do the bidding of their boss, the Minister-in-charge, and are assigned specific domains and work to execute. Ministries have different departments under them so, usually, they are assigned one department or the other. Some MoSs are assigned to handle implementation in particular states.

The Modi Government has been doing something peculiar. It has been giving multiple ministries to a single person and consequently increasing the number of MoS positions in the council. For example, Arun Jaitley was handling the Ministry of Finance, Defence and Corporate Affairs. After the reshuffle, Defence was handed over to Nirmala Sitharaman, but he continues to handle the other two. Nitin Gadkari was the Minister of Road, Transport and Shipping. Now he’s been given charge of Water Resources and Ganga Rejuvenation as well.

Consequently, lower down the ladder, someone like Radhakrishnan P is the MoS for Finance AND Shipping. What this might point towards is that he will act as a liaison between two ministries. Since inland waterways are one of the major focus areas of the present government, this MoS might act as the proverbial glue that brings the two ministries together. Another instance would be that of Arjun Ram Meghwal who, earlier, was MoS Parliamentary Affairs and Finance. Now he maintains the Parliamentary Affairs spot but Finance has been replaced by Water Resources. He’s going to report to Gadkari now, not Jaitley. We might just see a flurry of legislative activity in the Water Resources and Shipping side of things.

There are multiple permutations and combinations visible in the council which can potentially allow us to speculate about what this government is up to. Of course, they’ll all be speculation because we don’t really know exactly which area these Ministers will deal with IRL.

Apart from the fact that our PM don’t take no koschans from the media!

Heh.

Performance Review

Nirmala Sitharaman

Sitharaman has suddenly become the talk of the town after she was given the Defence Ministry. While BJP hailed her as the first woman defence minister in India, the Congress was quick to point out: “Uh no. Actually, Indira Gandhi was the first Defence Minister.” Regardless of whether she was first or not, it is a big deal that she got this ministry. She was clearly rewarded for doing something right. The question is, was it because of her performance in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, which she was given charge of earlier?

The Ministry of Commerce and Industry is responsible for handling foreign trade policy, specifically export of goods by different industries. The Economic Survey pointed out that although India has a paltry 1.7 per cent of global export business (China has 12 per cent), there is some hope on the horizon. In 2016-17, India’s exports grew to 12 per cent after a slump of two years. Imports decreased by 1 per cent resulting in a good overall gain for India.

This, without a doubt, is a decent performance. Take a look at the graph of exports and you’ll realise why Sitharaman was probably promoted from Independent Charge to a Cabinet rank Minister.

It remains to be seen how she handles the Defence Ministry from this point forward. She’s one hard-working lady for sure.

Sidenote: She’s from JNU. Just putting it out there. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Piyush Goyal

The rise of Piyush Goyal in the ranks of the BJP is nothing short of incredible. In last week’s reshuffle, he added one more feather to his cap after he was given the Railway Ministry, along with the Coal Ministry portfolio he already had. But the portfolio of Power and Renewable Energy was taken away from him and handed over to former bureaucrat Raj Kumar, who will handle it as a Minister with Independent Charge.

Piyush Goyal’s primary tasks as Power Minister were to focus on rural electrification, smoothen out coal supply and distribution and also increase India’s renewable energy capacity. Let’s look at each of them and see what progress his ministry made.

Rural Electrification: According to a reply given to a parliamentary question, there were 18,452 un-electrified villages in the country till April 1, 2015, of these, 14,080 un-electrified census villages have been electrified up to July 31, 2017. But, there is a small catch here. How do you define rural electrification?

The Ministry says:

So even if public places and 10 per cent of households in a village get electricity, they’re counted as electrified. As they say, the devil is always in the details.

Coal Supply: India has a perpetual problem of more demand for coal and less supply. Fixing that is quite a task. Take a look at this response from the Ministry of Power:

There’s a pattern emerging that the coal supply is catching up with the demand, although we are still way off from meeting the actual demand. We also import some coal to meet the shortfall, so the more our production goes up, less we will import. The power ministry has been steadily reducing the imports too. Coal imports have fallen from 217.78 Mte in 2014-15 to 203.95 Mte in 2015-16 and further to 190.95 Mte. in 2016-17.

Of course, coal is a bad fuel alternative, in general, so there has been an ongoing parallel effort  to switch to solar power-based renewable energy.

Renewable Energy: One excellent thing this government did was to hand over both Coal and Renewable Energy to the same person. It helped the Minister keep an eye on reducing dependence on the former and increasing the relevance of the latter. So how did the government do in this department?

According to government data, power generation through Renewable Energy has seen a crazy jump. In the last three years, renewable energy power generation jumped from 61,784 million units in 2014-15 to 65,780 million units in 2015-16 to a mind boggling 81,801 million units in 2016-17. Now THAT is a true jump. (See question 3214 for state-wise breakdown)

Wherever you look, Piyush Goyal has been delivering. After Suresh Prabhu messed up the Railways and earned the moniker of ‘derail minister’, he was replaced by Goyal. It would be safe to say, for now, that the Ministry is in good hands. Although, now that we have a new minister for the power ministry, can he keep up with Goyal’s performance?

Nitin Gadkari

Gadkari has been given an additional portfolio of Water Resources and Ganga Rejuvenation. Clearly, he has been doing something satisfactory in the transport sector to get one more Ministry added to his kitty. For this performance review, let’s look at two things (because context): Roads built over the years and inland waterways.

Road construction: For the past three years, the National Highway Authority of India has been averaging construction of 13 km/day of roads. Do note that State Highways are not covered under this because it is the responsibility of the state governments to construct and maintain them, so we will only focus on National Highways.

This is what the Ministry says (Q 3615 in Rajya Sabha):

There is something weird here though. If you add up the total roads constructed in the past three years, it would come to 14,731 km. But the target for this one year alone, 2016-17, has been set at 15,000 km. When the ministry said it’s ‘ambitious’, they weren’t kidding. Going by the targets they have set in the previous years and the actual roads built, I’m not entirely sure why such a high target was set OR how the ministry hopes to achieve it.

Oh well. Always aim high, I guess.

Inland Waterways: This is one innovative idea that Gadkari has introduced in the realm of Governance. He hopes to link rivers and start an inland waterway transport system. Like National Highways which come under Delhi, a legislation was passed to declare a few rivers as “National Waterways”. The Central government is now allowed to do works on these rivers. The proposal is to link, level and increase capacity of rivers to allow ships carrying cargo to ply.

India has a total 14,500 km of rivers, canals, backwaters, creeks and lakes, of which 5,600 km can potentially be used for navigation. Of this, 4,382 km of inland waterways have been declared as National Waterways (NWs). There are multiple projects underway to make these waterways a viable means of transport:

NW-1: Haldia to Allahabad (895 km) on Ganga-Jal Marg Vikas Project is being implemented at an estimated cost of Rs 4,200 crore with World Bank assistance.

NW-2: Dhubri to Sadiya (891 km) in Assam on Brahmaputra. Already operational.

NW-3: West Coast Canal from Kottapuram to Kollam along with Udhyog Mandal and Champakara Canals (205 km) in Kerala is being developed further. This NW is partly operational and is being extended.

Transporting cargo by waterways is going to be cheaper, of course. To give you a comparison, the cost of movement of 1 tonne/km of cargo by waterways is Rs 0.78, by rail it is Rs 0.94 and by road, it is Rs 3.04. All in all, it looks like a good move but with one slight… ok major, problem.

Environmental costs to waterways being used for transport should be taken into consideration. Rivers are going to be levelled and canals are going to be built to link them with each other. There is also the question of water levels in summer. Over the past three years, due to multiple factors, large (erstwhile) perennial rivers like Mahanadi have been drying up in summer. The water flow in the Ganga has been dropping steadily over the past few decades.

Perhaps, that is one big reason why Gadkari was also handed over Water Resources and Ganga Rejuvenation alongside his existing Transport Ministry. We might see some big moves in the Inland Waterways front in the near future. How very exciting… or not?

Few last observations about the reshuffle

The Modi government has brought in a bunch of bureaucrats as ministers. Many of them have been assigned to be MoS under Cabinet ministers who have been given multiple portfolios. This might mean two things. One, a reigning trait of babus is that they know how to follow orders. Perhaps, now that the 2019 elections are close, Modi wants to equip his ministers with do-ers rather than thinkers. Two, there might be a talent issue which the government is trying to deal with. There can only be so many efficient ministers, so give the currently efficient ones more staff, more work and more resources.

Aah well, in any which way, I believe we are about to see a flurry of activity in the government as they use the last 2 years to try and create this #NewIndia everyone speaks of these days.

End note: I am now hosting a YouTube show! ICYMI, do watch!