Dear Dr Singh: While making your first budget speech as finance minister you quoted Victor Hugo’s phrase, “an idea whose time has come”; you believed that India was indeed such an idea. You should feel good that the Indian tigress who was born in the early nineties has lived up to her promise. But she is still a cub. The tigress growing into adulthood must have strength in all her limbs and muscles; so too should every part of India grow into prosperity. You who have been the proponent of “inclusive growth” know this better than anyone else. We cannot rest until we have eliminated the moral obscenity involved in the fact that a quarter of our people go to bed hungry every night or that one-third of our fellow citizens cannot read or write.

The term you are about to embark upon is your true and major rendezvous with history. It will define your legacy. No government in a five-year term can succeed in doing too many things and a government with a vision for its citizens cannot afford to get bogged down by details. It is on the broad canvas that your attention and energies need to be focussed.

I commend to you just three items all of which have been

discussed and debated endlessly by committees and commissions. They now need your “liberating” touch!

One, education. An insufficiently literate and under-trained people cannot be an asset for any country. We need to take steps in this field like those you initiated in the early nineties with industry. Thirty-three approvals are required for a citizen to start a school. Fifty per cent of government school teachers do not turn up for work while sending their own children to private schools. Nay-sayers will argue that education is a state subject and that you cannot do much about it. You have been able to use the JNURM to force reform in urban affairs (for example, abolition of the Urban Land Ceiling Act) by simply making it financially attractive for states. Why not tell the states that the Centre will make available funds to them if they issue vouchers to poor students which they can use to pay for education in private or government schools? You can create a body like SEBI (a success of yours in the financial sector) to regulate the schools with a transparent process.

... contd.