Infrastructure development bypassing the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats

Infrastructure development is a key sector in which we have to have tremendous growth in upcoming years. Directly and indirectly it creates lot of opportunities. When the total wealth is considered, India is 7^th richest country on earth but we don’t have the infrastructure facilities that can be compared with other 9 countries in top 10. Even after 69 years of independence and being rich, we could not make any advancement in this sector. What could be the reason?

To me, it’s a 2 simple things

1. No visionaries, lack of commitment towards people and development of country, among political parties
2. Corrupt or hijacked bureaucrats

A development model which bypasses these 2 clusters can lead country. But from where can we adopt one?

Well, I believe that we have solutions for our problems around us, we just need to have open eyes and ears to identify and tailor them for our needs.

You witnessed how Flipkart transformed eCommerce sector in India. Now we have bigger players like Amazon in market. The tight competition among these companies provides better deals to the customers.

But how did they cut the cost? (let’s forget the promotional offers they have)

They simply eliminated the middle men.

Why can’t we follow that model in infrastructure development activities?

Who are the middlemen in our case? The corrupt politicians and Government officials.

  

Let’s consider this by an example – a particular city/village need more public transport. It can be trains or more buses. Let’s go with simple solution - bus.  Say they need 10 buses for their area. At present, the department accountable for the same may not have enough budget or it may be under the control of the negative elements I mentioned earlier.  In any case, the request won’t be addressed.

Now let’s look at the bigger picture. In India, there may be hundreds of thousands of villages or cities.  So we have a centralized agency, which can order 5000 buses, which they can get at very discounted price, can solve the problem.

Govt office hierarchy that is designed to load balance and distribute the work, does not seems to be effective. We need an alternate bottom-up approach to have faster resolutions for our problems.  

Bottom-up approach:

The requests from people has to reach the Govt directly via online portal and mobile applications (central or state) first. This way, Govt will have a clear picture of the overall needs in short time. Govt can handover the tasks directly to the companies with whom they have agreement.  There we need an agency to follow-up the tasks and complete them on time.

In this approach the control and monitoring is done from top level.  The offices in the hierarchy has to support the tasks when it comes to them.  The bureaucrats are answerable for the delay and rejection of the task which is controlled by upper management. (similar to the pvt company work)

This parallel organization approach will increase the competition and helps us to filter out the weeds from Govt services.  

  

***