MINIMUM GOVERNMENT, MAXIMUM GOVERNANCE

1. Context

2. Key points

1. The decentralisation of development. 
2. The policy of Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas aur Sabka Prayaas.
3. The idea of continuous performance improvement is based on competition.
4. The idea of improving implementation through the use of technology.

3. About Minimum interference and e-governance

• Essentially, "minimum government, maximum governance" refers to reducing government intervention in the common man's day-to-day activities and empowering the people to ensure their own as well as the country's growth and development.
• While there are several aspects to achieving "minimum government", it broadly includes making government processes easier by reducing red-tapism and corruption and encouraging e-governance.
• The government had eased the common man's life by abolishing around 1, 600 obsolete laws, doing away with interviews for government jobs and encouraging the digitization of facilities like the RTI.

4. Digital India

• A significant step by the government to push for a "Digital India" and encourage citizen participation was the "MyGov" platform, launched in August 2014.
• This is a citizen-centric platform to empower people to connect with the Government and contribute towards good governance.
• It also seeks expert advice from the people, thoughts and ideas on various topics that concern India.
• Citizens can join the discussion to share, debate and add value.
• The MyGov platform in 2021 claimed to have become the "world's largest citizen engagement platform with over 1.9 crore registered users.

5. NeSDA

• In 2019, the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances launched the National e-Governance Service Delivery Assessment (NeSDA) initiative to measure the success of e-Governance services.
• In its last report, which was published in 2021, the NeSDA said that 74 per cent of respondents of a nationwide survey had expressed satisfaction with e-services.
• The delivery of e-services on integrated or centralized portals over independent departments was driving "higher citizen satisfaction".

6. A push for privatisation

• "Minimum government, maximum governance" also means lesser public undertakings and a push for privatisation.
• The government had made over Rs 4.04 lakh crore ever since it came to power in 2014 through disinvestments.
• In the financial year 2023, it raised over Rs 31, 000 crore in disinvestments, according to the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management.
• This, however, falls much short of the full-year budget target of Rs 65, 000 crores.

7. Arguments for and against

• The idea of a smaller, smarter, more efficient government comprising clever people with better skills will be better than an over-weaning bureaucracy.
• Maximum governance also allows the intellectual force of the country to leverage the government.
• We need the government to do the minimum for stakeholders within a sector to regulate each other effectively.
• The responsibilities of a well-governed, well-functioning society should not reside with the government, they should reside right across the society.
• The citizens of any society have to keep fighting and acting to be a good society for any polity to work.

8. Framing the challenges 

• The role of the government in framing the challenges that face a society the identity of a nation, the aspirations, and their government cannot be minimum government because the government is the only body which can speak with one clear voice.
• Occasionally, in many small governments, where there have been attempts to roll back governments, the governments have also rolled back from that, which is problematic.
• It's particularly problematic in a country with many potential cleavages and where that framing is so important.

9. Concerns

• The basic principles that make an institution have the energy it does have been completely eroded.
• So the private sector works in areas where the profit motive is effective... Civil society works where there's voluntary persuasion... we persuade each other.
• The state works where something is backed by democratic legitimacy and coercion.
• Inserting the principle of coercion in areas where voluntary persuasion should work.
• Minimum government is going to mean CSIR will do slum redevelopment in Bombay designed to fail.
• The confusion of roles where in a sense the motivation underlying every institution that makes it the institution that it is, that gives its distinctiveness, when you blur that to a point, it completely actually erodes the professional identity of all those institutions.
• So, now the companies that are beginning to behave like bureaucracies and government, on the other hand being transactional and profit-minded.

For Prelims & Mains