Realistically Yours

Planners in the government are often like homegrown businesses: set a target much higher than needed, assuming a lower motivation and effectiveness among the people who implement it. When asked, a top government official once said that targets are set in such a way that the sectors’ needs should be met if a major proportion of it is achieved. The remaining can be assumed to be a margin of error. Roads had proclaimed a 20 km-a-day highway-building target, only to de-emphasise that figure in recent times; power targets have never been met in any of the Five Year Plans, and the less said about implementation of concurrent schemes such as the JNNURM. Political convenience is an obvious reason for this overestimation, coupled with a more general factor, the “Indian-conditions” adjustments to planning. This kind of planning is hardly limited to the government circles. Indeed, the highlight of every poorly structured infrastructure project and every project lender’s nightmare is the bloat.

Which is why power minister Sushil Kumar Shinde deserves to be a newsmaker this month. Although he heads the sector that has grown better than most others in infrastructure in the past few years, he is working on a scaled-down power target for the 12th Five Year Plan, down from 1 GW earlier to 75,000 MW generation from conventional energy sources. Uncertainty in coal and oil are the main factors. Our infrastructure sectors reach a “cruise cycle” whereby it should be more predictable than ever before how many projects will go live in the next few years. Perhaps the power ministry’s scaling down is a lesson for other sectors—not just at the public policy level, but at project levels as well.