Guruswamy said that while the Government was very keen to address issues such as the declining trend in public expenditure on education, health and agriculture, it has not really managed to do much. ``My distress due to our inability to translate these into action is, therefore, even more acute... While it may be those outside Government who may be responsible for much of what has been happening, we cannot continue to believe ourselves to be blameless.

Our responses have been slow, feeble, and often too late in coming to be of any consequence,'' Guruswamy'sletter says. ``This has made our Government to appear as not being very different than all previous ones and this is my great disappointment.''

Guruswamy has been in the thick of controversy in recent weeks for his role in trying to structure a series of incentive packages to bail out various industries, including steel and commercial vehicles. While Guruswamy was seen as the prime mover behind most of these proposals, it is believed that most decisions were taken at a fairly senior political level, and he was just the front-runner.

The latest controversial decision was a notification by the Commerce Ministry to discontinue free or OGL imports of certain steel items if they were below a certain value -- the notification, a blatant attempt to protect the domestic steel industry (reported in The Indian Express

, January 30), was issued after the finance ministry lobbied hard for it. Other controversial decisions include a directive to various financial institutions asking them not to lend money to theUS-based Enron's Indian power plant, or to the US giant GE Caps' fully-owned subsidiary on the grounds that GE Caps was under-cutting Indian non-bank financial companies (NBFCs).