DISCRETIONS, QUOTAS AND PREROGATIVES ARE A BOON TO CORRUPTION MOTIVATED GOVERNANCE

Indian growth story is suffering at the hands of a governance motivated by corruption and corruption alone. This corruption can be in the form of monetary benefits to those at the helm of affairs, their close associates  their near and dear ones, the political party to which they belong or deriving benefit through influencing voters and vote banks. In any mature, honest and sincere governance, discretions and prerogatives are used for the good of the nation.But in India unfortunately this is not the case and discretions, quotas and prerogatives are a boon to corruption motivated governance. 

• Discretion means  ability or power to decide responsibly and in the best interest of the nation by ignoring or side stepping the normal rules and regulations in vogue. A notable example is Dr APJ Abdul Kalam when he was given an extension as the Scientific Adviser to the Minister of Defence. No eyebrows were raised from any quarter. Extensions and re-employments  have to be rare exceptions rather than a rule and today this has become common practice in all walks of bureaucracy and judiciary for rewarding people for their loyalty to the chair rather than loyalty to the nation. This practice along with the discretionary practice of rewarding through allotting of residential properties tames the members of executive and judiciary and is certainly detrimental to the health of the country.
• Prerogatives in the true sense mean doing something at the whims and fancies/likes or dislikes of the powerful and can be tolerated till such time they are not motivated by anything other than this. Recently we have been hearing a lot about the prerogative of Chief Minister of Haryana in transferring Mr. Khemka an IAS officer and even the recent reshuffle of Indian cabinet of ministers wherein all the actions don't seem to be totally above board and do point out to some ulterior motives.
• Quotas and licenses is another major bane of the growth story of India. Recent examples of spectrum allocation, coal allocation and arm twisting tactics of Reliance Industries are glaring examples of this bane. Surprisingly the nation's natural resources have little or insignificant evaluation and all  the value of the end product comes through the efforts of the favoured vendors. So much so that the government of the day managed to get a favourable decision from the highest court of the country in the matter of allocation/ auction of natural resources in the name of policy of the government. I wonder if the honorable court verdict said that all policy decisions that cause a loss to national exchequer should be encouraged or actions that bring in money for the exchequer have to be discouraged but the government definitely feels so. The coal could definitely be made available with best commercial consideration and the end product i.e. power could have been subsidized to mitigate the miseries of common man. This route is certainly amenable to subsequent need based revisions/ need to lower or doing away with the subsidy at a later date. In other words it is dynamic in nature and does away with no income from our natural resources for all times to come.