In his book, “making India work”, William Nanda Bissell has endeavored to directly confront the poverty facing India by recognizing the enormous potential that the country has at its disposal. This is in spite of the high levels of grinding poverty that afflict more than 60 percent of the population. As Bissell has rightly observed, India is not a poor country. Instead, we ought to blame the poor management structures in the country for the problems that we are now faced with (Bissell, 2010).
In addition, Bissell has pointed out that India considers itself to be a superpower, and yet well over 60% of the country’s population is faced with grinding poverty. The transformative ideas that Bissell proposes are intended to ensure wealth generation at the grassroots level, as opposed to relying on a trickle-down effect. One cannot help but observe how Bissell’s book is an attempt to provide solutions to the problems that been forecasted by Mahatma Gandhi in his fundamental principles of living.
According to Gandhi, need, as opposed to greed, ought to constitute the foundation of all forms of consumptions and in light of this, he made a clarion call for suitably scaled institutions, that is, locally decentralize institutions that can easily be access by the people. In addition, he also warns us against blindly imitating the consumption and industrialization patterns that are a characteristic of the western nations. In his book, Bissell has endeavored to capture four fundamental ideas:
Scaling down government
Bissell proposes the adoption of a government structure that consists of four levels. In this case, Bissell recommends that the community should constitute the fundamental and active unit of government, effectively replacing the Panchayats (Bissell, 2010). Bissell proposes that the community should be made up of 25,000 people.
In addition, he has also recommended that districts should be replaced by a group of 100 communities, or what he refers to as an Area. Moreover, a collection of 10 Areas would effectively replace the state. At the highest level of these 4 stages of structural governance is the Nation (Bissell, 2010). Bissell has advocated for a simplification of the government, in addition to ensuring that its roles are reduced by way of setting standards, individual rights, and monitoring and regulating compliance.
Furthermore, Bissell asserts that this structure would be most ideal in helping to reduce the bureaucracy that characterizes the Indian government. At the moment, there are 22 million strong government servants and Bissell is convinced that this figure should be reduced to 2 million government servants.
Ending poverty
The Indian government has assumed a scattered approach in its quest to alleviate poverty. As a result, only a fraction of the financial assistance really reaches the intended beneficiaries. As a result, a majority of the Indian shall still remain poor. In order to end the poverty cycle, Bissell recommends the adoption of a voucher system, one that he has called Targeted Catalysts.
In this case, the Targeted Catalyst would ensure that each individual is guaranteed of receiving six fundamental services namely, drinking water, nutrition, healthcare, sewage disposal, education, and legal assistance (Bissell, 2010). The private sectors would be charged with the responsibility of ensuring that these essential services are provided to those in need, for purposes of increasing effectiveness and efficiency.
Therefore, Indians in need of these vital services would receive the vouchers from the government and present them to the private service providers, who would then have to be reimbursed for the services provided by the government (Bissell, 2010). Further, Bissell has recommended that the reimbursement value should be pegged on the quality rating of such a private providers, meaning that those who are in a position to provide better services also receive better pay.
Tax simplification
The prevailing excesses of taxes namely, capital gains tax, incomes tax, excise duty, and sales tax, among others, often times discourage productivity. In addition, a high collection and compliance cost is often attached to these taxes (Bissell, 2010).
In a bid to overcome these shortcomings, Bissell has proposed the adoption of a simple system of taxation that is primarily based on property tax that is an annual rate of one percent on the value of property, to be collected by communities. Bissell further contends that even as the prevailing tax system has the potential to realize approximately $120 billion in terms of annual revenue, nonetheless, the proposed new system has the potential to realize a total annual revenue collection of $300 billion at a lesser cost than that accrued by the current system of taxation (Bissell, 2010).
In addition, Bissell argues that embracing the proposed new system of revenue collection would ensure that the community government becomes empowered since most of the revenues collection, along with a spending of the same on the identified Targeted Catalysts would effectively occur at the Community level.
The Real Cost
Bissell has endeavored to unearth the underlying cause of the failure by the modern day capitalist nations. In this regard, he argues that today’s capitalism has not succeeded in placing the deserved value on the real cost of production, such as the environmental cost of producing products, the actual cost of production, as well as the cost of disposal (Bissell, 2010).
As a result, Bissell argues that there is need to take into account the real cost of a product when we are computing its pricing. In the same way, as citizens, access to clean water and air constitutes the basic human rights and as such, we are entitled to these. Bissell has also observed that environmental exchanges shall enable those communities that have invested in clean water, biodiversity and forest to trade credits with their counterparts who are still aging behind.
Consequently, this shall translate into increased investment in efforts to ensure greener environments (Bissell, 2010). Besides, Bissell has also presented a worked out transition and National Asset Corporation plan that would make use of the public sector assets value for purposes of financing government downsizing efforts, along with other transition costs.
Reflection
Bissell has managed to accurately diagnose the challenges facing India. For example, he has vividly managed to illustrate how mere talk on sustainability, poverty alleviation and inclusive growth may not actually succeed until our governance, political, welfare, justice economics, development and planning systems have all been fundamentally transformed. There is need to appreciated the fact that India should not be compared with a machine that require re-engineering.
The recommendations provided by Bissell are too prescriptive, not to mention that they almost solely rely on rational thinking, economics concepts, and design and engineering, and have failed to take into account the cultural, emotional sociological and relationships aspects. For instance, Bissell is convinced that if the right system has been implemented, individuals and communities alike shall rationally and automatically work hard in order to ensure maximization, in addition to ensuring that the accruing benefits are equitably shared.
In yet another example, Bissell has recommended that the community and state boundaries be reorganized on the basis of the overall population, with little or no regard fro linguistic, ethnic, and cultural identities. Even as Bissell’s suggestion still remains a logical and fundamental one, nonetheless, he has abhorrently misjudged the potential ensuring emotional responses. Bissell should have considered the significance attached to emotional and cultural identities that simultaneously “empower” and “divide” and “hold a system together”.
Group behavior is characterized by various unique elements, such as the issue of systemic influences, individual vs. collective morality, and downward causation, among others. Apparently, in deriving his solutions to ensuring that India works, Bissell has somewhat ignored these aspects. Bissell has also been seen to assume a “mechanistic” view of the systems. In this regard, he has sought to view the various systems in the Indian government and government as machines capable of being dismantled, re-engineered or assembled.
Nonetheless, it is important to appreciate the fact that the proposal by Bissell to downsize the various economic and governance systems in India is not only a relevant undertaking, but also one that would result in increased transparency and enhanced service delivery. Change is painful and as such, there is often the urge to resist it. However, through a redesigning of the subsystems and systems in India, this would effectively acts as a stepping stone towards the transformation of India into a prosperous and sustainable nation.
Reference
Bissell, W. N. (2010). Making India Work. New Delhi: Penguin Books.