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Business News/ Politics / Policy/  NDA government to showcase its achievements
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NDA government to showcase its achievements

Celebrations this month will focus on the government's greater accountability and transparency, and fight against corruption

A file photo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Photo: ReutersPremium
A file photo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Photo: Reuters

New Delhi: The fight against corruption, greater accountability and transparency will be the focus of government celebrations as the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) completes two years in office later this month.

Senior NDA leaders said the celebrations will also focus on participative governance and making people stakeholders in the decision making process.

Senior leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) said the first step towards a cleansing process against corruption came when a special investigation team (SIT) was formed to bring back black money from foreign banks soon after the NDA came to power two years ago. The demand for greater accountability has also put pressure on government and political parties to become more transparent in their functioning.

“This government, unlike Congress, is bent upon abhorring populism and politics of shortcuts. We believe in the politics of performance. When a government performs, it doesn’t require to go for populist measures and corruption is inherent to such measures. Our government is populism free and hence corruption free too," said Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, vice-president of BJP.

Among some of its important policy initiatives, the government launched the Swachh Bharat Mission soon after it took office to ensure cleanliness and to rid the country of open defecation by 2019, as well as the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao (save girl, educate girl) scheme, which aims at arresting the trend of declining child sex ratio in the country and promoting gender equality.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was sworn in on 26 May 2014, along with a 45-member council of ministers.

Sahasrabuddhe said that in the last two years, there has not been a single allegation of corruption against the government and that senior ministers have made efforts to make their ministries more people friendly.

“The demography of the country is young, the youth doesn’t support corruption in any way. People are now more demanding and they want clean and transparent government. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has sent across a message that corruption will not be tolerated. The cleansing process has started from the top," Sahasrabuddhe said.

In its effort to bring greater transparency in the bureaucracy, the NDA has abolished interviews for Class 3 and Class 4 jobs, and allowed self declaration and self attestation of documents, as well as lodging of grievances through mobile phones.

Forty-two schemes have been brought under the direct benefit transfer in the last two years.

The trio of Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and Mobile (JAM) schemes is aimed at reducing corruption and leakages in gas subsidies while the government held auctions for both coal and spectrum allocations, and Parliament passed the Black Money (Undisclosed Foreign Income and Assets) Imposition of New Tax Bill, 2015.

The Congress party, which lost power in the 2014 general elections mainly due to its unpopularity over a series of corruption charges, has lost out in every state election since then, except for Bihar, where it is a junior party in a grand alliance led by the Janata Dal (United) and Rashtriya Janata Dal.

Even after the drubbing in the general elections, senior leaders of the party have been connected to cases of corruption and impropriety, the most recent being party president Sonia Gandhi being attacked by the ruling BJP in the AgustaWestland case.

The opposition party, however, feels that anti-corruption, greater accountability and transparency cannot be the defining themes of the two years of the NDA.

“One can only laugh at the false claims of the government. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will have to face the music soon with the CAG (comptroller and auditor general) indicting the then state government (in Gujarat) under Modi of giving windfall gains to some corporates. As far as the AgustaWestland case is concerned, why did the Modi government take the company out of the blacklisted companies," Shakeel Ahmad, senior Congress leader and spokesperson said.

“How can this government talk about corruption when its own chief ministers are involved in scams. Neither has the Prime Minister said anything on it, nor has any inquiry happened. If there was accountability, how did people like Vijay Mallya flee India and no action was taken against Lalit Modi?" Ahmad added.

Political analysts however feel that while the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) suffered from corruption allegations, the effects of which are visible in the AgustaWestland helicopter deal, there has been a deliberate attempt by the government under Modi to look different from the previous government.

“It is a very smart strategy of the government. The NDA has been boasting that there are no corruption allegations against it in the last two years and so it wants to showcase it through its achievements. To make people part of governance and policy decision through Swachh Bharat or Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao programmes is also a good strategy to reach out to people," said A.K. Verma, a Kanpur-based political analyst and political science professor at Christ Church College.

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Published: 02 May 2016, 12:46 AM IST
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