Change India: An agenda for the next prime minister

By Raghav Bahl and Dhiraj Nayyar

Welcome to Think India. Our media-active think tank begins work at a time when India is passing through an incredibly challenging period in its economic advance. If vital indicators are any sign of the health of the economy, India is ailing. Even the intellectual moorings of our economic crisis have been dislocated. Advocates of enlightened economic growth are painted as heartless elitists, baying for more wealth disparities. On the other hand, those who push for unsustainable doles are dressed up in saintliness. But that is no reason to surrender to cynicism. We strongly believe that despite the tough global economic conditions, India can prosper if the right policy frameworks are put in to place quickly. We also believe that the growth versus inclusion debate is entirely concocted. Once we have growth, we must have inclusion and redistribution. The next General Election due in 2014 will be a pivotal moment in history. A dynamic new administration would have an opportunity to revive the India story.

The realm of ideas is no monopoly of the Government. The country has a critical mass of experts; from academia, from think tanks and from the real world of practitioners; who can together be a formidable knowledge base. It is with this background that Think India has embarked on its first project “Change India: An Agenda for the Next Prime Minister” for which we will invite the finest minds from across the country to draw up an action plan for the person who will take over the reins of Government next year. Often such ideas are expressed in theory and academic postulates — but we have taken care to extract Action Points, so that the Next Prime Minister can hit the ground running. We have eschewed the temptation to use complex prose - instead, the Strategic Policy Agenda will be presented in easy to understand “bullets”, supported by case studies and illustrations, that can, given political focus and will, be implemented.

The inspiration for Change India is drawn from Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership. Over three decades ago, in the run up to the US Presidential Election of 1980, the Heritage Foundation, one of America’s top conservative think tanks, drew up a comprehensive policy agenda for the next President. Though the agenda was based on centre-right economics, Heritage reached out to the presidential campaigns of both Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. Only the Reagan campaign responded. When Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as President of the United States in January 1981 one of his first acts was to distribute copies of the Mandate for Leadership to members of his Cabinet. It was to become the blueprint for reform in America, an architecture which redefined and enriched America’s fortunes in the coming decades.

Like the Mandate for Leadership, Change India leans on the side of free market economics and small government. Its potential throttled by the visible hand of the Government, India needs a dose of radical reform. Our 140 point action programme that straddles 14 policy domains, with contributions from over 30 expert minds, is not written for any political party. We would only be delighted to share it with any interested political party, whatever its colour in India’s rainbow political spectrum.

India needs to move beyond the bitter partisanship of party politics to evolve an agenda that would serve the best interests of its 1.2 billion people. Our Agenda for Next Prime Minister is a small contribution to this exercise. In the hands of an able Government, it could be a really big idea, a potent weapon, something which could Change India.

See more at:   http://thinkindia.in.com/pm-agenda/lets-change-india-2/