Corporate honchos to add value to Manmohan govt

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has taken a laudable initiative to engage the private sector talent to improve the quality of governance of the country. No other past Prime Ministers have done so to the extant Manmohan proposes to engage successful professionals from the private sector to improve the government's performance. A worthy precedent was set by former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi who drafted the services of Sam Pitroda to usher in the telecom revolution in the country.

While public-private partnership is a great initiative to take the country forward, the question naturally arises as to whether this new thinking reflects the failure of and mismanagement of public administration by the political leadership in the country. A case in point is the Air India. The government is falling back on the private sector talent to revive this behemoth organisation after it ran into losses worth a whopping Rs5000 crore! Who is responsible for this massive losses? Only the self-seeking, incompetent and corrupt politicians are to be blamed for this mess-up. If the political leadership is to depend on the private sector to run a public sector organisation profitably and to revive sick PSUs, then why not privatise PSUs and let the government get out of the business of running industries? Or do the politicians want to retain control over PSUs and use them as milch cows until they run into the red? The UPA leadership who is now going ga-ga over hiring private talent owes the nation an answer to this question.

Manmohan Singh made a prize catch by getting Nandan Nilekani, one of the biggest brands of Corporate India, to head the Unique Identification Authority of India(UIADI). Nilekani who set up Infosys, India's second biggest IT company, together with N R Narayana Murthy and five others 28 years ago, will head the central government's project to provide unique ID cards to all Indians.

Nilekani will have the rank of a cabinet minister and he has been given a deadline of two years to complete the project. The government seeks to achieve three-fold objectives by issuing the UID cards: 1. Enhance national security; 2. Check illegal immigration, particularly from Bangladesh; 3.Ensure that the benefits of government welfare schemes reach the targeted sections. The ambitious ID card project is estimated to cost around Rs 1.5 lakh crore and will offer a multi-billion dollar business opportunity for the domestic technology players, with the first phase of the project — which will cover ultra urban, urban, and semi-urban populations — alone offering a Rs 6,500 crore business opportunity. Corporate India hailed Nilekani's appointment as a bold initiative to ensure good governance through public-private participation. Interestingly, Nilekani is leaving Infosys on July 9, a day before the Company is to announce its first quarter results.

source : http://news.in.msn.com/national/manmohanmarksheet/article.aspx?cp-documentid=3070977