The new minister has his work cut out. He must end the licence raj that the ministry continues to operate and he must allow private investment to build the 1,500 universities we should have started building ten years ago. He must abolish the AICTE (All India Council of Technical Education) as it is an anachronism that serves mostly to block technical education. And he must be personally involved in encouraging educational institutes of all kinds to bloom and flower. This will not happen as long as officials in Delhi decide such minute matters as salaries that colleges can pay professors.

Personally, I was disappointed to see a déjà vu cabinet in which there is a preponderance of what TV anchors like to call ‘Congress heavyweights’. These are mostly tired old men who have shown us many times before that they are incapable of either new ideas or new methods of governance. The Prime Minister must have reasons for still wanting them around but could he do the country a favour and keep them out of ministries that deal with infrastructure, health, poverty alleviation and urbanisation. Our problems in these areas are too serious to be dealt with offhandedly for yet another five years.

Meanwhile, it is time for the Prime Minister to deliver on his promise of administrative reforms. We can no longer afford to pay for the convoluted systems of governance that have remained unchanged since the days of the Raj. Why should Indians need to fill up fifty-page forms to get a passport when everywhere in the world one page suffices? Why should everything that the Government of India does involve ten times more procedures than are needed anywhere else? Why should every government office still have cupboards full of dusty old files in this age of computers? Think of the forests we destroy annually to keep the Government of India’s paperwork going? His colleague, P. Chidambaram, once told me that the bottom ten items in any ministry’s agenda could be eliminated painlessly. It’s time to eliminate.

... contd.