Siddaramaiah’s loss is Vasundhara’s gain

BANGALORE: A chief minister’s advisory council with Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Mohandas Pai, Manish Sabharwal, Ramesh and Swati Ramanathan as members would have you believe we’re talking about Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah’s think-tank. But these prominent Bangaloreans have recently been named to Rajasthan’s BJP CM Vasundhara Raje’s advisory body to spur the economic and social growth of the desert state.
With the 15-month-old Congress government of Siddaramaiah too busy with the minutiae of government and lacking big, bold ideas to rejuvenate the battered Bangalore brand or speed up growth and development in the rest of the state, Bangalore’s rich intellectual capital is being tapped by other states.
A good example is Siddaramaiah government’s inability to decide what to do with Nandan Nilekani. After his Lok Sabha defeat, the Infy co-founder and former Aadhaar chairman made himself available to the state government. While Siddaramaiah insists he’ll use Nilekani’s expertise to put the mojo back in Bangalore, he also admits he hasn’t got anything concrete in mind, yet.
Siddaramaiah’s problem may be that in March he set up a vision group for Bangalore which has urban expert Ramesh Ramanathan as executive chairman. The group, which has politicians, corporate leaders, economists and civic leaders as members, is chaired by Ramalinga Reddy, the minister in-charge of Bangalore.
Nilekani, busy finishing his second book on governance, expects to spend the next few months travelling and delivering guest lectures at Harvard and MIT in November.
Raje’s advisory panel, whose vice-chairman is noted economist Arvind Panagariya of Columbia University, will give inputs to various committees the Rajasthan government is setting up to boost economic and social development.
Meantime, Karnataka’s planning board is functionally defunct. Siddaramaiah, who has been loath to fill up the numerous vacancies to boards and corporations, has so far filled only one, nominating his friend from the Janata parivar days, CM Ibrahim, as deputy chairman of the state planning board. The members are yet to be announced.
Raje has put together an impressive advisory panel staffed with economists, bankers, eminent civic personalities and industrialists. Other than the Bangalore five, it has Ajay Shriram, chairman, DCM Shriram; economist Bibek Debroy; Harshavardhan Neotia, chairman, Ambuja Neotia Group; senior media professional Malavika Singh; bankers Naina Lal Kidwai and Uday Kotak; Rajendra Pawar, chairman, NIIT; Rajesh Shah, co-chairman, Mukund and economist Rajiv Kumar.
The Bangalore lot is a mix of businesspersons (Shaw is head of Biocon, Pai is chairman of Manipal Global Education, Sabharwal is chairman of Teamlease) and urban experts in the husband-wife duo of Ramesh and Swati who run Janaagraha, a non-profit that works for citizen participation in urban, local government.
Sources say Raje feels compelled to quickly get down to work because she’s learnt lessons from her unexpected defeat in the 2009 elections, and also from Congress’ defeat – despite running a highly populist government with subsidies galore –in May.
Raje was “was very surprised with her loss last time and felt she didn’t get independent feedback. This time she wants to make sure she hears from people outside the system. Also, she has succeeded one of the most populist and massive subsidy-giving state governments ever and that didn’t win them an election. So, while she cares deeply about poverty alleviation, she realizes that people care about infrastructure, jobs, and education,” said a source who has tracked Rajasthan.
As far as Karnataka’s seeming apathy goes, said a source: “Karnataka is not hungry because of the cluster effect. They have huge momentum because of IT.” This is borne out by the fact that even with the state government doing zilch and the infrastructure crumbling, Bangalore is the entrepreneurial hub of the country today, especially for the burgeoning digital economy while the traditional IT sector continues to tick along nicely.
Another reason could be politics. Lack of political stability – coalition governments were the norm in the 2000s and the last BJP government was racked by dissidence almost from its first year in office. “This makes leaders insecure and crimps long-term thinking. But, they need to be careful about taking their opening balance for granted,” said an industrialist.