Thaindian News

Book: “Infrastructure at the Crossroads: The Challenge of Governance (OUP)”; Author: Gajendra Haldea; Publisher: Oxford University Press; Pages: 232; Price: Rs.575

If a man’s impact is judged by the number of his detractors, Gajendra Haldea is the Top Gun in our post-1991 infrastructure story. As Vinayak Chatterjee of Feedback Ventures once wrote, and such is the power of Haldea’s reports and notings, “The recent history of infrastructure in India is divided into two periods - BH and AH. That is, Before Haldea and After Haldea!”

Indeed, here’s a civil servant who doesn’t mind, even relishes, leaving many “gnashing their teeth and foaming at the mouth”. Who else would start his forthcoming book, “Infrastructure at the Crossroads: The Challenge of Governance”, quoting T.S.R. Subramanian, his then cabinet secretary, that the government would have been better off paying Haldea, a mere joint secretary, a billion dollars, and retiring him from his service!

In fact, before his own retirement in 1998, Subramanian even revised his utter frustration, suggesting that the “pay off” to Haldea could have been $5 billion. The superset of those “upset” by Haldea’s stand 13 years later expands each day, including ministries, governments, private developers, consultants and regulators, not to mention the really annoyed cabinet minister Kamal Nath, once the czar of India’s highways.

But as Haldea mentions to those he knows and trusts, he isn’t here to be loved and cheered. Besides ports and airports, highways and railways, when it comes to human beings, his loyalties are vested in one man — Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia. Without once defending his protege in public, it is Ahluwalia who has ensured that the dissenting voice isn’t muzzled.

Subramanian hasn’t found a post-retirement sinecure, but Haldea, a 1973-batch officer of the Indian Administrative Service from Rajasthan, never had a day off. He’s back on re-employment as Ahluwalia’s advisor, shaking the tree, on a princely salary of Re.1 a month, that too so that the pay rolls don’t stop reflecting him!

To the system’s credit, this man who questions so much, has been allowed to author the Electricity Bill and 12 model concession agreements for public-private agreements in different sectors — thus, much of the private investment in India’s infrastructure. But his carp, as stated in the book under review, remains that rather than becoming magnets for de nouveau private monies, public private partnerships have become sophisticated excuses for diverting public funds.

Here, Haldea doesn’t just indict the engineer-contractor-politician nexus, but international development agencies too, for their preference to go via the government, a machination incumbent ministries and departments are only too happy to abet with.

We, thus, notice blunt questions on even marquee public projects like the Delhi Metro. Haldea refers to it as an extraordinary example of project management, but then warns that it isn’t amenable to replication:

“It’s CEO (the redoubtable E. Sreedharan) is an outstanding project manager, who has been given an unprecedented tenure of over 10 years… the equity is held equally by the Central Government and the Government of Delhi, which means that neither exercise direct control in any way… thus giving unparalleled freedom and authority to the CEO… above all, the first phase receiving Rs.100 billion from the government at an average interest rate of 1.2 per cent per annum and large tax waivers that imply substantial subsidies… with half of its operational costs being met out of sale or leasing of real estate.”

Indeed, if Haldea were around, his inquisition may not have allowed the finance ministry to absorb the foreign exchange risk for Delhi Metro, which it did after then finance secretary C.M. Vasudev acceded to Sreedharan, and ended a merry-go-round that had gone on for two years.

The jury is out on what these characters look like after 10-20 years. Also, if Haldea were around for Shah Jahan, the Taj Mahal would still have come up. For now, however, he is busy setting the cat among the pigeons on the Regulatory Reforms Bill and the Public Procurement Bill.

(31.10.2011 - Rohit Bansal is co-founder and chief executive of India Strategy Group at Hammurabi and Solomon Consulting. He can be reached at rohitbansal@post.harvard.edu)