Chanakya's New Manifesto: To Resolve the Crisis Within India by Pavan K. Varma Page A

people as well. For a long time now though the upper house has become a sinecure for failed politicians or a parking place for those for whom there is no other place in the political system. We need to use the Rajya Sabha to widen the catchment area of talent for governance.
    1.46  The PM, and all members of the Cabinet, must compulsorily retire on reaching the age of seventy. This ceiling will prevail even if a PM has not completed the tenure of ten years or two terms that he is entitled to. India is demographically one of the youngest countries in the world. It is time we took steps to allow octogenarian politicians who are past their prime in terms of both health and intellectual capabilities to give way to younger people. In fact, in many other democratic countries, chief executives are required to retire at an earlier age, and it is recommended that in due course the retirement age should be brought down to sixty-five. The trend in many leading countries of the world is for heads of government to be in their forties. In Bhutan, even the king has to compulsorily abdicate in favour of his heir at the age of sixty-five. India does not need to mechanically follow this trend, but there is functional merit in having chief executives who are in the prime of their physical and intellectual capabilities.
    1.47  Beyond the political level, governments should increasingly bring managerial, technocratic and technological talent into the bureaucracy when required. There is nothing sacrosanct about those who constitute the bureaucracy. Some states, like Bihar, have already taken this sort of initiative. The Nitish Kumar government has decided to recruit thirty-two professionals from the open market to oversee the time-bound implementation of rural development schemes worth6,000 crore annually. These professionals will be paid a salary substantially above what even the cabinet secretary to the Government of India earns. There should be no hesitation in paying such individuals well, because talent has a price. In any case, this is a very small cost towards the furtherance of better governance. Care, however, should be taken that such outside recruitment does not become a means to merely finesse the legitimate bureaucracy or encourage nepotism.
    1.48  In pursuance of the policy of good governance, the time has come for the government to exit all areas it has no reason to be involved in. For instance, hospitality and tourism are areas which the government, apart from providing an enabling policy framework, should immediately exit and leave to private players. Similarly, all loss making or sick Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) must forthwith be divested or the government should sell a majority stake to a plausible strategic partner. The so-called ‘navratna’ PSUs, such as HPCL, BPCL, BSNL, MTNL, CIL—to name only a few—are all incurring heavy losses and are buried under a mountain of debt. The process of incremental disinvestment should commence even in PSUs that are considered strategic, such as ONGC and the oil-marketing countries. This approach should even include public sector industries in the defence sector, whose inherent inefficiency is largely unaccountable and hidden from public scrutiny under opaque and outdated notions of secrecy. Disinvestment through a transparent mechanism to the right strategic partner(s) would bring in much-needed revenue to the government. More importantly, it would signal the end of an ideological era where the government was expected, whether it could deliver or not, to exercise a monopoly in key areas of governance. In the milieu of competition and economic reform, the time has come to finally bury this notion.
    1.49  Governance requires the understanding that mechanically doling out subsidies cannot be a substitute for policy. Subsidies are the easiest populist solutions for governments that refuse to take hard decisions involving foundational change. They are also the easiest resort for