It was billed as a big Modi vision statement day. But if the gathering at the India Economic Convention in New Delhi today, attended by business bigwigs and global investors, was expecting tall talk about how Narendra Modi was going to combat fiscal deficits, cut subsidies, implement various reforms and boost growth, they would have been a trifle disappointed.
But the Gujarat chief minister and BJP prime ministerial candidate went beyond the vision thing and offered something that is sorely needed: the promise of a 24-hour prime minister who would tackle the country's problems by getting to the roots. His message: vision is important, but execution ability is super-critical.
Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. PTI
In doing so, what he essentially offered was a simple promise that would read something like this: "I am a nuts-and-bolts man in a country where there is more vision talk and planning than implementation. You can trust me to get things done. I will fix things since I have no other agenda."
In Modi's scheme of things, and especially before an election, it did not make sense to talk about how he will liberalise labour laws or cut food subsidies or reform this or that. Not when every bit of specific action will upset some voter constituency or the other. Modi avoided the trap by focusing instead on how he has tried to do things and how he will approach problems if he becomes the next PM. He positioned himself as a holistic problem-solver – which is what many people think the country needs right now.
While the world has billed Modi as a right-wing hardliner and business-friendly politician, Modi chose to look at the larger picture of India's opportunities rather than its limitations.
Using his penchant for alliterative point-making, he talked of the country's three D's—democracy, demography and demand—as its biggest assets. ("We are the youngest nation in the world." So why can't we harness this advantage?)
In his view, these assets could not be fully utlised unless the country's deficits were addressed.
But if people were expecting talk about the fiscal or revenue deficit, he referred to more fundamental deficits: the governance deficit, the democratic deficit, the trust deficit, the moral deficit, the ease-of-doing-business deficit, and the safety and security deficit – among other deficits.
He made his usual political point when he called the last 10 years of UPA rule as "the lost decade" for India, saying we have fallen off our perch and pessimism rules.
So how do you build lost trust and recover optimism? Modi's simple answer had more D's: direction, dedication and determination. These are obviously things he feels he excels in.
All his examples of direction, determination and dedication came from Gujarat. Calling himself as "24-hour CM" he talked of the Gujarat government's solar policy, which promised Rs 13 per unit to people setting up solar units for feeding into the grid. The Centre then came up with a return of Rs 19 per unit—but Gujarat did not lose any of its solar power entrepreneurship for the simple reason that the policy and implementation were aligned. The Rs 6 gap in earnings were more than made up by the ease of doing business in Gujarat.
What Modi displayed was his attention to detail and implementation skills. While others merely talked about the policy and its benefits, Modi explained how Gujarat managed to squeeze more out of its solar policy. This is how: the solar panels were, in many places, set up above canals. This had multiple benefits. It saved land. The solar units also reduced water evaporation from the canal. And the cool waters of the canal improved power production from the solar units overhead. And since the power was consumed nearby, there were lower transmission losses.
On growth, which is the country's main concern, Modi's approach was elliptical. He seemed to suggest that growth too comes from doing things right rather than announcing things. He pointed out that Gujarat was a drought-prone state, with droughts in seven years out of 10. But the state's focus on water conservation, soil quality, seeds, and use of technology in agriculture made it a high agri-growth state – with an average of over 10 percent growth over the last decade.
Put another way, he was saying if you deal with the nuts-and-bolts of implementation, growth will follow.
Modi's second big pitch was on federalism. He strongly criticised centralised planning in Delhi and more or less rubbished the need for a Planning Commission. If Modi becomes PM, we can expect the Planning Commission to be made irrelevant, if not scrapped altogether.
In Modi's world, it is the states that give India strength, not Delhi-driven policy or resource allocations. He said Delhi cannot evolve policies for states, for this needs you to consider each state's strengths, and not offer one-size-fits-all solutions for all states. He subtly promoted himself by pointing out that almost all prime ministers were Delhi animals. What Delhi now needed was someone who understood states and had done good work there.
He said foreign investors should not be visiting Delhi but the states in order to take decisions and pointed out that investors in Gujarat saw no need for a Delhi visit.
His idea of a national cabinet is not a bunch of ministers sitting with the PM in Delhi to decide issues, but a super cabinet where the PM and CMs jointly decide what is good for the country. "The Union cabinet is not complete without the CMs," he seemed to imply.
A third priority he offered was simplifying laws. He had a clear antipathy to excessive legislation – a UPA tendency where everything has been converted into a right (right to food, right to education, etc). Though he did not specifically refer to these as hindrances, he did say that for every new law legislated, 10 others must be scrapped so that it is easy to follow the law. He expressed horror at the sheer amount of laws we pass without bothering about implementation.
A fourth angle—meant to debunk his right-wing image—was inclusiveness. He talked about giving dignity to labour rather than labour reform, he talked of women's empowerment by investing in areas where women were the driving force of the economy (animal husbandry, agriculture, healthcare, milk production), he talked addressing issues of wellness rather than just sickness (recalling Gandhi's emphasis on cleanliness and preventive healthcare), and improving teacher availability so that education can be improved. ("You can import CEOs from anywhere, but you can't get good teachers.")
In Modi's scheme of things, if you invest in cleanliness and preventive healthcare, the government's health budget can actually be reduced. That's a subtly radical idea no doubt – which any supply-side economist would approve of. Modi's belief in more governance, less government, clearly emerges in the details – if not the broad vision.
Towards the end, he took a dig at Finance Minister P Chidambaram, who alleged that Modi's knowledge of economics could be written on the back of a postage stamp. Modi's rebut was simple: he said he didn't even need the full side of the postage stamp to define his approach to economics: for Modi, it means being a trustee - of public trust, money and expectations. This mirrors what Gandhi asked industrialists to become. This was also an indirect dig at the UPA, which has been squandering money in scams and schemes in the name of the poor.
Modi's ultimate calling card was his willingness to devote time to day-to-day governance by being a 24-hour chief executive. "Bad governance is like diabetes. It invites all other diseases," he said.
What Modi was offering his audience was not insulin, but a sugar-free diet that would avoid diabetes.
