DailyPost 2276
TO BE AN EAGLE…
To be an eagle you have live with the eagles. All the expertise / skills and behavioural traits can be learned, gained and perfected only in that manner. These with the equally important behavioural attributes which are even more difficult to inculcate, cumulatively make you can eagle and enable you to achieve what they do. This can be translated into the capabilities of a professional or even of a professional supervisor. Whatever might be the field from supposedly manual skills to engineering, medicine and research, how the enablement happens in a near similar manner, is known to us all. But when it comes to politics and governance, it goes topsy turvy?
What is the reason? The challenge with politics is that the skill and all concerned ecosystem is that of the politics and what you are supposed to deliver is governance. Whatever might be the system and structure democracy provides for government creation and its sustenance / functioning, the knowledge, expertise and behavioural attributes does not connect at all. Think of the skills required to keep rising up the political ladder and to win elections and the ones needed to run a department, ministry, agency or undertaking of the government, role on legislature committees, standing committee, official delegations and what not. The whole idea of the visible connect between politics and governance gets unstuck.
In this politico-governance conundrum, expertise, knowledge and capability to deliver or a demonstrated capability in these areas does not command any respect, because nobody has any of these. How can one run a ministry or department without having any expertise of it? That too in a scenario of it being an microcosm in that field for its country wide operations, control, guidance et al. The interplay of expertise even in one such ministry or a state government department, unfortunately would not have been mapped till today. What expertise a minister requires or the secretary requires from dept to dept to ministry to ministry and from organisation to organisation has not been mapped to this day.
So broken expertise system has become the order of the day. It has been reflected in policies, projects, human resources employment, execution mechanism, cost and time calculation, and ever fledgling schemes and mega projects in this country. As a patch work consultants, advisors and consulting agencies are put on display to satisfy the public perception. They have absolutely no idea of the subset of governance, technology, management and execution. Expertise creation does not happen in day anywhere, even if you have working in a similar area or technology. The exact expertise only delivers. Lateral entry can also do some patchwork, and also the famed training and study tours at different levels and at different locations. We need at least a decade long blueprint to initiate transformation towards an expertise enabled governance.
CAN A BROKEN EXPERITISE SYSTEM EVER DELIVER?
Sanjay Sahay