The Hindu : Front Page : Manmohan promises end to tyranny of 'inspector raj'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Aug 25, 2004

Front Page

Manmohan promises end to tyranny of 'inspector raj'

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, AUG. 24. Announcing a slew of measures ranging from revamping the regulatory framework to a committee for monitoring infrastructure projects besides reviving his Council of Trade and Industry, the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, today promised to end the tyranny of the `inspector raj' and re-energise the economy for achieving a sustained 7-8 per cent growth.

By striving to create an enabling environment that rewarded creativity, risk-taking and the spirit of enterprise and adventure, the Government would work towards transforming India into the home of multinational corporations of the future and a "superpower of the Knowledge Economy" through its programme of modernisation and industrialisation.

He was inaugurating the Assocham-organised J.R.D. Tata Centenary Celebrations here.

India could not stay away from the irreversible trend of globalisation, he said. The country should first become domestically competitive and the private sector would need to invest in research and development, managerial skills and global economies of scale.

Public finances

Reiterating the Government's commitment to fiscal discipline and improving the public finances, Dr. Singh said that though he had written to his colleagues in this regard, both the Centre and the States would have to focus on improving the management of public finances and public enterprises to meet the objective of increased public investment in social and economic infrastructure.

Terming the decline in capital formation in recent years distressing, he said the Government was determined to reversing the trend by creating the policy and political environment required to boost investment. "[The] Government will closely monitor the progress in all key infrastructure projects, including airports, power, telecom, roads and ports, on a quarterly basis to ensure that targets are met. To this end, I am setting up a committee on infrastructure that I will chair myself," he said.

Role for Plan panel

The Planning Commission would function as the executive arm of this committee, identifying bottlenecks in the implementation of policy, guiding the Ministries to speed up the implementation of projects and generating ideas for its consideration.

Promising to end the "tyranny of over-inspection," Dr. Singh said the Government would ensure a regulatory framework that was transparent, autonomous and world-class, and which provided an impartial balance between public and private sector suppliers. The Commission had been asked to prepare a paper on the regulatory structures for different areas such as power, roads and ports.

The country would need to push up the growth of agriculture by four per cent and that of industry by 10-12 per cent to achieve a seven-eight per cent overall growth even as it checked fiscal deficit and improved the public finances.

Tax compliance

To accelerate private investment, the two most important requirements were infrastructure and incentives, Dr. Singh said. The incentive structure was more or less in place due to the tax reforms. The simplification of the procedures for tax compliance and related issues would be tackled in the next Union budget, he said adding that measures such as Value-Added Tax had addressed the fiscal policy agenda industry had been signalling for some time.

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