Should India have a deputy PM? Gurcharan and Sanyal air different views

Former P&G CEO Das, who proposed the idea, said this individual should be a leader who would coordinate among different entities to raise competitiveness of the economy

Should India have a deputy prime minister to coordinate among different entities to raise competitiveness of the economy? Former Procter and Gamble India chief executive Gurcharan Das and Sanjeev Sanyal, member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM), on Tuesday aired differing voices on the subject. The suggestion was made by Das, who said the current government departments at the Centre and state governments were working in silos.

"The competitiveness touches every central ministry, and every state government. We know that these are silos and these are unwieldy structures. The only coordinator in our system is the prime minister. Even he does not have much control over the chief ministers of states. I have a suggestion which many of you will find controversial. It is to have a competitiveness czar at the level of a deputy prime minister of the country," Das said at a panel discussion on ‘Competitiveness Road Map for India@100’.

Das believed this work should be done by the prime minister but said he had other things to do. "The job here is not to create another central ministry. It is not about having people in another department but to bring a very high level of political power in order to raise competitiveness into the top of the mind of the country," Das said.

This particular individual, he said, had to be a very special kind of a leader who would use the skill of coordination or motivation or nudging or communication. 

He quoted Margret Thatcher as saying that she used to spend 20 per cent of her time in reforming and 80 per cent in selling those reforms. "None of our reformers have done that from 1991 onwards," he opined.

"I would say I am not talking about adding people in ministry, but having a political clout to work with the current system to deliver results, such as enforcing contracts where we score the lowest in the world, solving the problem of skill shortages in specific sectors, bringing women in the workplace, and so on," Das said.

For his part, Sanyal said in his address that there was something called department view in India. "This is an utterly absurd idea. Either it is an idea that takes the interests of the country forward or it does not. Taking forward the interests of a specific department is rather a pointless activity," he said.

He said if the government is to do things efficiently, there needs to be internal coordination and breaking of silos.

"My own view is that this won't get solved by having a competitiveness czar. Sorry, Gurcharan, I don't agree with you. This is a cultural problem. To get another person on the top trying to be a competitiveness czar, forcing this coordination is not going to work. What you really need is to break down this culture," Sanyal said.