Interim report

The UPA government’s resolve after being elected to set an ambitious agenda for itself in the first 100 days was quite unrealistic.

Prime minister Manmohan Singh seemed to have felt that something needed to be done to assure the people in general and the business sector in particular. Of course, the news on the economic front is more positive today that it was in May but that has little to do with the government. Pranab Mukherjee’s budget in July was not exactly inspiring. Other extraneous factors have played a role in this revival.

But it is not only on the economy that Singh and his colleagues focused their 100-day plans on. The race for such populist announcements attracted ministers as far apart as Kapil Sibal (human resources development), Kamal Nath (surface transport) and Jairam Ramesh (environment and forests). This is not to deny that ministries and departments should not have targets and timetables. What is questionable is the setting up of unrealistic time-frames like a 100-day race.

Any report card for this period is bound to be full of failures and a few successes too, though on both fronts it must be remembered that three months is hardly enough to do or undo much. Policy initiatives take years to fructify and what is in place takes years to change.

One such example is what Sibal is attempting in education with some haste — significant and seminal changes. Yet on critical fronts like regulating the so-called deemed universities, even he has come a cropper.

The government has already faltered on foreign policy. The major blunder that the new government has committed was of course at Sharm el-Sheikh when Singh had agreed to the inclusion of Balochistan in the India-Pakistan joint statement. The prime minister and the government had a tough time in explaining away the gaffe. This is an area that bears watching closely in the coming years.

The new government has already had to face problems — the H1N1 pandemic, poor rains, an incipient drought and rising prices. More such challenges will come. Artificial time-tables like the 100-day deadline eventually mean little. It is at best a headline-grabbing gimmick.

The government needs to settle in for the long haul and work towards its agenda. Its final report card will not depend on what it achieved or did not in its first few weeks.