beyondbrics

India doesn’t have enough bureaucrats.

That’s the message one of the infrastructure industry’s top executives delivered at a conference Monday, defying conventional wisdom by saying that what the Indian government really needs is one more ministry.

Lalit Jalan, CEO of Reliance Infrastructure, suggested that the government create a “ministry of infrastructure”, one presumably made up of bureaucrats to add to the 10m-plus that currently run the state and central governments.

“They should have a war room kind of a thing in each of the states so they can monitor 10-20 key projects,” he told the crowd at the Wharton Indian Economic Forum in Mumbai. “The same thing would happen at the national level – that’s the way forward.”

Ask any foreign or domestic executive – nay, ask any citizen – what 1000 things India needs to move forward, and new infrastructure would likely come in somewhere in the top 10 (along with less poverty, better sanitation, more clean water, an end to corruption, a proper education system, adequate healthcare, and so on).

“More bureaucracy” would come near the bottom of a very long list, just above “fewer toilets”.

From neighborhood cops and municipal councillors to members of parliament and cabinet ministers,  politicians and bureaucrats, (or “netas” and “babus”, as they are known) generally irritate the average Indian citizen.

But Jalan said that he believes that as India aspires to spend more money on much-needed infrastructure in the future, the process must be better regulated and streamlined.

Fellow panelist Chanda Kochhar, head of ICICI Bank, however, was not so sure.

If a new ministry is created, “we will spend a lot of time defining what is infrastructure… so rather than that,  we have to take it project by project,” she said. “Many projects are 90 per cent [completed] but they are awaiting two approvals. I think we have to prioritise as a country and say, ‘can we do something about those two approvals to get x million dollars in capital investment’?”

Indeed, Jalan should be careful what he wishes for.

Each of the major scandals that has rocked the subcontinent over the last year – and indeed, many of those that have cropped up since the republic formed – were the product of the slimy nexus between business and politics.

After all, what do the following all have in common: the Bofors scandal of the 1980s, the recent spate of mining scams and the multibillion-dollar telecoms scandal? The public anger is now so great that thousands of middle class Indians have been coming on to the streets to protest about rampant corruption.

Politicians and businessmen colluding to exploit an opaque bureaucracy’s convoluted rules and regulations, and countless layers of red tape.

Is adding one more layer of administrators to a sector in which the government plans to invest a tantalizing $1 trillion in the next five years really the answer?