Opinion The incredible powers of a junior minister

Instead,he made decisions on a project by project basis and mostly ended up stopping projects in which huge investments had already been made. His inspector raj methods ruined the investment climate because more often than not his decisions to allow or stop a project were arbitrary and inexplicable. If officials working under him dared question the arbitrariness of his choices he had a standard response. ‘I have orders from above.’ Nobody worked out whom he meant because he openly defied the Prime Minister more than once. And,hinted that there were powers higher than the man who gave him his job.

When he became what the The Wall Street Journal described as ‘India’s green wrecking machine’,the Prime Minister chose to eject him from Environment. But,instead of sacking him,has now put him in charge of Rural Development where he will soon be seen as a rural development wrecking machine but by then,it could be too late to rectify the damage.

Last week,Mr Ramesh,ever hungry for headlines,went public with charges that the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh was stealing NREGA funds. He provided a list of districts in which NREGA money has been supposedly used wrongly and made it clear that since the Chief Minister had not acted against the culprits,she was obviously in on the plot to rob the poorest people in her state. What the Minister did not tell us is why,if there is fraud on such a massive scale in our largest state,he is not putting a stop to NREGA and using the money for better purposes like rural roads,schools and hospitals. Surely,if NREGA is responsible for creating a vast infrastructure of corrupt practices in UP,we must assume that it is doing the same in other states? I know from my own investigations that it certainly is. A more responsible Minister of Rural Development would stop the scheme altogether and rectify it instead of making cheap political capital out of it. How is it that fraud on such a huge scale has been discovered conveniently just before elections are due to the UP legislature?

Now,in the hands of Mr Ramesh has been placed the new Land Acquisition Bill. If it becomes law,farmers will be disallowed from selling irrigated or arable land. This will surely cause trouble in the countryside as will the complex rules of sale which tie buyers and sellers up in proceedings that could last decades. In a country in which there are dodgy land records and no guaranteed land titles,this new bill will result mostly in clogging up our courts already clogged with land disputes. But,Mr Ramesh eager to show the ‘powers above’ what an efficient creature he is,made it his first task in Rural Development to start making a noise about the importance of the new Land Acquisition Bill.

A question that baffles me personally and should be addressed by the Prime Minister is how a new Land Acquisition Bill has ended up in Rural Development? Will land,in future,never be acquired in urban areas? If not,how will we build future metro systems and city roads? But,I digress.

The only point I want to make here is that when a Minister like Jairam Ramesh causes reckless damage,will he be held accountable? Will he be made to compensate the thousands of ordinary workers who lost their jobs on arbitrary environmental grounds? Will he be held accountable for the thousands of crore rupees of public money that have been wasted because he stopped projects halfway into completion? The Prime Minister owes it to us to demand accountability from his ministers and he must be seen to do this.

Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter@tavleen_singh