Reports that the Centre is considering the winding up of the Task Force on the possibly over-ambitious project for the inter-linking of rivers need to be received with concern. It is nobody's case that the report, or the project, should be accepted in toto, or in part, but an elected Government having spent so much of the tax-payer's money on the study, its successor has the duty to keep him informed - and seek his inputs to decision-making. If there is a message from the mandate of Elections-2004 it is that the 'voter knows the best', particularly on the much-ignored developmental issues of the kind.
The need for a report of the kind could not be stressed more, given the drought of the past years across the nation, and also the pending river-water disputes, both in the North and the South. If anything, the unilateral initiative of the Punjab Government and Legislature to annul an earlier agreement with Haryana and Rajasthan through legislation has only added a new dimension and a greater urgency, given the possibilities of its adoption elsewhere, too.
To the extent the Task Force was a creature of the Supreme Court in a way, the Government is duty-bound to take orders from the highest judiciary on the next course. Given the controversies already attending on the proposal, facilitating a national debate would help the court to arrive at certain conclusions. It would also help seal for good unproductive discussions on the subject that for long had needed ending.
At the bottom of it all is the need for evolving a consensual approach to developmental issues at the national-level.. Whatever be the benefit of the reform process, it facilitated the evolution of a broad national consensus on economic policy-planning, despite the quick change of governments and perceived ideological differences. Maybe, the BJP's earlier stress n politics, as different from economy and development, helped matters when the party came to power. Even the Left parties now concede the need for reforms. Their reservations are only about specifics and details, even as the party and the leader who had piloted the reforms process now feel the need for re-introducing the 'human face'.
Such a consensus approach has also evolved on the foreign policy-front. In the two months in office, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has lost no opportunity to stress the need for adopting such a course, after the predecessor Vajpayee Government took the initiative for evolving one on such crucial issues as Iraq and Kashmir. Maybe, the Vajpayee Government was influenced by its demonstrated inexperience on the foreign policy front to seek out the Opposition's views. Maybe, it needed to shift the national agenda away from economics and onto politics, but without re-visiting domestic controversies of the Ayodhya kind, given the nature of the coalition government it then headed.
Developmental issues are no less important than the economic policy frame-work, or foreign policy discourses when it comes to need for continuance with change, or change with continuance. Given that coalition politics has become the order of the day, and regionalisation of policy-planning on all fronts has become unavoidable and inevitable, policy change with every passing election should be a temptation that the political community has to avoid.
The loss is no less on the economic and foreign policy fronts, but it is development that would suffer the worst, as massive projects of the river-link kind would take decades and billions to complete. If anything, parties and alliances in power would be tempted to plan for the short-term, and try benefit electorally from them, rather than planning for the medium and the long-term. It is a trend that is already prevalent in the States, with the likes of Kerala and Tamil Nadu leading the pack - and should be discouraged.
If anything, an equivalent of the Fiscal Responsibility Act should be considered to ensure that Governments as institutions entrusted with the developmental tasks are audited for performance before grants and credits are cleared for new and alternative projects. The loss otherwise would not only of the State or the Government as institutions, but also of the 'human face', which is not going to like the politically-motivated project-changes one bit. However, continuity of Governmental policies and programmes should not be confused with homogenizing the thought-process, which is a dangerous game of 'mind control', instead.
* Views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Observer Research Foundation.
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