Different kinds of roads make a city. There are roads which are barely pucca, some which have a generous spread of potholes and provides many more chances of being run over by rapidly moving traffic. There are also roads which are just a dream come true; smooth and wide with space for pedestrians to walk. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out which road needs attention first. Yet our planners and implementers ignore, what at first glance seems like common sense. This blog seeks to cite a few examples to highlight the problems of coordination and planning that persist and pan over a variety of services and schemes.

A frequent occurrence in the streets of Delhi seems to be the digging up of perfectly good roads and pavements and then re-laying them without any difference before and after. In last years monsoon season , our erstwhile Chief Minister was quoted in a national newspaper saying that one could only pray that the rains would stop as this was the only way to address the perennial water-logging problem faced by the city.(click here for the article) After a great deal of pressure, the Public Works Department (PWD) was put in charge of removing the silt. However, once they removed the silt, it was another agency’s mandate to pick up the silt and clear it off the streets. In fact, call it a comedy of errors or bad planning; before the agency could remove the silt, it rained again, pushing all the silt back, where it first came from. There is no example that is closer to home, to highlight the systemic lack of coordination between different agencies.

Underground lines have to be laid for gas, electricity, telephones. Sewers and roads have to be dug up for this purpose. It seems to escape the imagination of all agencies involved, that the four lines can be laid at once. Instead, while laying their own line, agencies somehow manage to damage the pre-existing lines and other line departments have to be called to fix not just the previous damages, but also the current ones. A vicious cycle emerges.

This acute lack of coordination isn’t restricted only to the roads in Delhi. A report by International Institute for Population Sciences, in collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund, identified that lack of coordination across different sectors such as health, social welfare and education, adversely affecting schemes related to providing financial incentives to the Girl Child. A presentation by Dr. Jacob Shapiro at the IGC conference held in Delhi last week discussed the geography of infrastructure provision. He mapped the country’s Rural Electrification Program, the ‘Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana’ (RGGVY), with the Unified Access services. Under this, mobile operators were being able to set up mobile towers in rural areas with heavy subsides from the government to improve access and communication in the remotest of remote areas. Unfortunately, these efforts are mostly in vain because the overlap between electrified villages and villages with mobile towers is currently low.

The simplistic view would be to believe that problems in planning and implementation are due to incompetency. For anyone following India’s development discourse closely, the problem of intra-department and inter-department coordination seems to originate from questions of intent or incentives.

Perhaps from a rent seeking perspective, it makes more sense to dig up the same stretch of road as many times as possible. Contemporary Public Economics identifies the state as comprised of self interest maximizing individuals whose best interest often does not coincide with society’s. With respect to the inter and intra department coordination problems which are a recurring theme in the failure of state to perform to it’s potential , there is little that one can do, outside the government  to address the problem. If one is well versed with the provisions of specific schemes where inter-departmental coordination has been specified, there is still some scope of holding agencies accountable for not coordinating.  We need to take a closer look at this systemic and systematic chaos that continues to plague the most basic of government functions.