Indians get to grips with good governance: John Freebury and Mike Brown report an initiative aimed at bringing good governance to India while Australian Natasha Davis discovers that new freedom of information laws coupled with some determined grassroots activism is bringing far-reaching change in the country

For A Change, June-July, 2004 by John Freebury, Mike Brown, Natasha Davis

Chandrashekhar Prabhu was a gold medalist student of architecture and town-planning in America's Ivy League when former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sent two emissaries to tempt him back to his country of birth. He wasn't interested--he had just got his Green Card and accepted a post at Massachussets Institute of Technology. Finally, the Prime Minister confronted him in person. 'What if you could change the fate of your city?' she asked, He was on the plane home to Mumbai next day.

It's a question that stirs many high achieving Indians. But, as Prabhu found when he dug into the realities of his city of 12 million, whole systems of corruption and vested interests make bringing change daunting if not downright impossible.

'Creating ethical business in India is like trying to grow strawberries on Mars,' says Mumbai businessman Suresh Vazirani. 'You may be able to do it in a controlled environment. But at what cost and effort!'

Neither man is giving up though. Vazirini's high-tech biomedical equipment company has won national awards for quality and exports--all done without paying bribes. Prabhu has battled the coalitions of corrupt politicians, developers and mafia which keep Mumbai's urban development mired in unmanageable problems. As Chairman of the Maharashtra State Advisory Committee to the Department of Housing, which works steadily to resettle Mumbai's six million slum-dwellers, he has instigated over 60 legal cases to make government answerable, and promises to do 'whatever one can' against systemic corruption.

The two reformers joined others at a conference on 'Better Governance: from fear to opportunity' at the Initiatives of Change conference centre in Panchgani, India, during March. It was organized by the Asia Pacific and Africa Regional Group of Caux Initiatives for Business (CIB-APARG).

The conference brought together a growing network of senior government officials, social workers and NGOs, media and industrial leaders who have launched a Centre for Governance to act as a national thinktank to provoke government reforms in India. They first came together a year ago to grapple with the social and policy challenges confronting India under globalization, and decided that it came down to better governance. (See FAC, Apr/May 2003 and Apr/May 2004).

As Prabhat Kumar, former Cabinet Secretary, put it: 'If any country wants to derive maximum benefit from globalization, it must put its own house in order--with good political and corporate governance.'

Opening this year's conference, Kumar highlighted the huge disparities between Indian states in critical areas like child mortality rates, illiteracy and poverty. Punjab, for instance, has 130 times the per-capita income of Jharkand, a tribal state of which Kumar was until recently Governor.

While India basks in the 'shining' achievements of high growth rates, unprecedented foreign exchange reserves and a booming IT industry, 'the debit side of indifferent and unresponsive governments far outweighs the innovative measures', argued Kumar.

Through the March meeting two major agenda directions emerged for the Centre for Governance. RD Mathur, one of its convenors, summed these up as:

* Tackling corruption at both a symptomatic and a systemic level by enlisting civil society, the business sector and all stakeholders involved.

* Working to improve the ethics and values of individuals and organizations. Roundtable meetings held during the past year, together with training programmes at various levels of government and industry, could begin to help meet this need, he said.

Conference participants found an emerging synergy between senior bureaucrats and NGO activists like Arvind Kejriwal from Parivarten (see p7). Sunita Nadhamuni, coordinator of Bala-Janaagraha--'a citizens' movement for better governance'--described a partnership programme called PROOF (Public Record of Operating Finance) which tracks public disclosures of municipal accounts, performance indicators and government spending in Bangalore. The challenge of moving 'from representative democracy to participatory democracy', she believes, is most appropriate at the level of local government.

A rapidly expanding area of governance is 'e-governance' (the control of procedures and workflow via computers). The benefits are already evident, argued Nadadur Janardhan who, through a UN agency, has advised over 30 governments on introducing e-commerce in international trade. Through a vast network of fibre-optic cables, the state of Andhra Pradesh has made government records available in English and local languages. Already, it has brought a dramatic reduction in land disputes, which occupy 70 per cent of court cases, claimed Janardhan. Medical records available state-wide are improving health care for the poorest. Employment opportunities and better marketing of primary products were bringing significant benefits.

But, warned Asheesh Khaneja, who as an executive with Oracle South Asia has also been involved in bringing this software revolution to Andhra, 'E-governance is not a short-cut to budget savings or a clean and efficient government.... It often presents both costs and risks.' Its implementation was best preceded by developing ethical leadership and standards, he suggested.