What other states can learn from Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu’s newly elected DMK Chief Minister MK Stalin has put together a formidable team in his first Economic Advisory Council which requires a close look to see if it can hold some lessons for the rest of India. This is because it would be difficult to think of a better collection of global talent with focus on the Indian economy that can help the government steer the economic ship along the right channels.
Two of its members — former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan and former Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian — know more about how to run the country’s economy than most, combining both high academic credentials and day-to-day hands-on experience. Two others — Nobel laureate Esther Duflo and Jean Dreze — are top-flight academic economists with Left and grassroots focus. The fifth member of the team — S Narayan — former Union finance secretary who moved on to the PMO to oversee economic policy under Vajpayee, can hardly be bettered in terms of experience in helping shape and put in place the country’s economic agenda.
The most obvious thought that comes to mind is that a chief minister has given himself a team which a prime minister should be proud to call his own. Through this, Stalin is also being credited with having very subtly scored a debating point with the present Prime Minister by saying in so many words — ‘look, I have been able to put together advice which was there for you to use, but you chose not to.’ This way, he has joined the current Centre-versus-states battle of wits without being raucous like the West Bengal Chief Minister.
The advisory team in place, the most critical issue that emerges is: will Stalin be able to put to good use the formidable array of talent that he has had the resounding good sense to line up by his side?
Stalin has had years and years of experience as a lieutenant to his father, former longstanding Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Karunanidhi. He has had all the grooming he could possibly need to prepare for the top job he now holds.
He has also had direct hands-on administrative experience by having served as Chennai’s mayor. During his term, he was credited with equipping the city with flyovers which eased traffic temporarily. Flyovers are currently out of favour among urban planners, but till not so long ago, city dwellers considered them a status symbol and thought they were a magic solution to the urban traffic snarls.
Stalin is considered to be a doer, who is sensible. He is politically mature, in fact full of political savvy, and is far from being an intellectual himself. All this appears to have enabled him to play down the anti-Brahminism of the Dravidian movement which would have unnecessarily antagonised the present ruling dispensation at the Centre.
With all this going for him, what is the task ahead and how is he likely to use the advice he will get? The foremost challenge before the DMK government is to fight and get the better of the pandemic, with Tamil Nadu having one of the highest levels of infection and fatalities. But the DMK government is not alone in this battle and can be expected to use the agenda for action that emerges as a kind of a consensus across the country.
In sum, as the country gets the better of the virus, Tamil Nadu can be expected to do the same. For its part, Tamil Nadu, under Stalin, is considered to have been quite proactive in the Covid-19 fight by actively organising Covid beds, bringing Covid-19 treatment in private hospitals under the government’s insurance scheme and issuing a global tender for vaccines.
The longer term and, perhaps, the most important challenge that the DMK government faces is having to live with a highly strained financial situation. Its own revenue mobilisation efforts will have to go beyond relying excessively on taxes from liquor and fuel. Again, in this, it will be in the company of other Opposition-ruled states in fighting with the Centre for a legitimate share of the GST revenue. But it has made its financial task more difficult by making abundant election promises of freebies which will have to be kept.
In a truly long-term sense, the big challenge before the government will be defining its development strategy. Here, it can be argued that the state already has the right strategy, being one of the foremost in per capita income and also scoring very high in terms of human development indicators.
So, it can be argued that Duflo and Dreze cannot tell Tamil Nadu to do this and not that as it has already in place some of the basic elements of taking care of those at the bottom of the pyramid. For example, in Tamil Nadu, women who can choose sometimes, prefer to go to a government hospital instead of a private one for child birth, thus giving a certificate to the quality of public healthcare. Kerala is known to lead in this, but Tamil Nadu is not far behind.
Useful advice from the council will be two-fold. Rajan and Subramanian can give a lot of good advice on how to manage the state’s finances so as to keep its head above water and also how to fight with the Central government for more GST revenue and other resources. Duflo and Dreze can give highly useful advice on how to take the human development agenda further forward from an already high base.
What can the country or the other Opposition-ruled states learn from all this? Get a leader who is a practical doer, get the best advice possible, and use it to get things done. Luck plays a role in every human situation. In this, Tamil Nadu is blessed with one of the best bureaucracies in the country. So, other states should try and turn luck their way by seeking to improve the quality of their own bureaucracy. This cannot be done in a day, but a beginning can be made.
