Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan completes one year in office on November 11, a tenure that has been marked by complaints about files not moving and acrimony between the two ruling coalition partners, the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). Mr. Chavan and his deputy Ajit Pawar often speak about the compulsions and limitations of a coalition government and the Chief Minister is unhappy about how key portfolios like Home, Finance, Power and Planning are with the NCP.
However, even Mr. Pawar, who is critical of the Chief Minister's indecisiveness, feels that it will be difficult for a single party to come to power in the State. Senior NCP sources said that if at all the party had to go alone in a State election, it should have negotiated for the Chief Minister's post the second time the coalition came to power in 2004. “That would have given the NCP a chance to show the people that it meant business and set the tone for five years. The party could have proved that it was capable of running the government single-handedly,” the sources said. If any change in the sharing of portfolios was to be done, it should have been done at the time of elections, feels the NCP.
However, though the Congress did try and raise the sharing of portfolios, nothing conclusive was achieved. Every time Mr. Chavan complains about the NCP having the Home, Finance, Power and other portfolios, the NCP is swift to hit back that as Chief Minister he has complete powers and can take important decisions. Earlier, Congress Chief Ministers didn't complain so much, they went ahead and took decisions, NCP leaders said. To add to the disquiet, the decision of dissolving the board of directors of the NCP-controlled Maharashtra State Cooperative Bank in the State, the apex bank which reported negative net worth upset Ajit Pawar no end.
If the State is proud of one thing it is the emphasis on e-governance and transparency that Mr. Chavan is keen on. He has also decided to update and computerise land records using the latest techniques of land measurement, the first time after the British did it over 80 years ago. The Chief Minister is also wary of the Right to Information (RTI) Act and avers that decisions must be taken in a transparent manner since records can now be made public under the Act. After he took over, he scrapped two dubious plans for slum redevelopment approved by his predecessor and is reviewing other similar projects which were hastily cleared.
The NCP, on the other hand, with Mr. Pawar at the helm, has made financial discipline its mainstay and given carte blanche to the sales tax and excise departments, which led to an increase in revenue collections. In his budget speech, Mr. Pawar said there was a 26 per cent increase in sales tax collection in 2010-11 over 2009-10 and a 31 per cent increase in stamp duty collection for the same period. Revenue receipts showed an increase of 23.3 per cent over 2009-10 and the government expects to collect Rs. 1,21,503 crore in 2011-12.
However, Mr. Pawar feels strongly that Mumbai has been lagging behind in infrastructure and is against the decision to build an overground metro and a monorail. The mono rail is a failure in other countries and an underground metro would have suited Mumbai better, he said. He also slammed the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) for its lack of foresight and planning and inflicting the city with skywalks. Mr. Pawar is clear that the proposal for a coastal ring road in Mumbai would never get environment sanction and instead it was better to facilitate the extension to the Bandra Worli sea-link, which was mired in funding and land issues.
Ever since he took over, the NCP has been miffed that the Chief Minister is slow on file clearances, forcing Mr. Chavan to repeatedly clarify that he has indeed been doing his paperwork. In addition, the media has been talking about how he has been keeping the builders at bay, and even MLAs in his own party are unhappy with some of his decisions on redevelopment of old buildings. To be fair, Mr. Chavan has been rather shocked at the level of corruption in the State and has had to overturn some of the decisions taken by his predecessor, notably in the case of two slum development projects.
On the minus side, farmers' suicides in the State continue unabated, parts of the State report high child malnutrition, and several areas are poor and under-developed. Mumbai too, which generates substantial income tax, has become a rather miserable place to live in. It was ranked 116 among 140 cities by the Economic Intelligence Unit's new Global Liveability Survey. While the Shiv Sena controls the city municipal corporation, which is slated to go to the polls next year, the Congress cannot absolve itself of the near shambles the city has been reduced to with its unplanned maze of flyovers, under construction metro, potholed roads and poor infrastructure. There is definitely room for improvement, and the perception that Maharashtra lacks governance, as some Wikileaks cables suggested, cannot be wished away.
