India Inspires: Redefining the Politics of Deliverance

By Tuhin Sinha

Nitin Gadkari, Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways, Shipping, Water Resources and Ganga Rejuvenation, is among the most efficient ministers of the present government. From an average highways road construction pace of 3 km/day in May 2014 when he took over, under his tenure this figure now stands at 27 km/day. The National Highways, earlier a stretch of 96,000 km, is now in the process of being expanded to double the length. An unprecedented number of new expressways have been launched, whereas important highways whose construction had been stalled for years have now seen the light of the day.

In the shipping sector, under the ambitious Sagarmala Project, the government is developing port infrastructure along the country's 7,500 km coastline. The project includes modernization of the ports and islands and the creation of coastal special economic zones.

In his new ministries-Water Resources and Ganga Rejuvenation-Gadkari has infused new energy with path-breaking initiatives around the interlinking of rivers and expediting the cleaning of Ganga. If one takes into account the sheer magnitude of cumulative infrastructure development work undertaken by Gadkari's ministries over the last four years, it is nothing short of an infrastructure revolution.


In this book Tuhin provides a rare insight into the working style of the maverick minister, besides telling us how these ministries are silently and crucially fuelling Prime Minister Narendra Modi's dream of New India.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Aug 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9789388038065

Book preview

diligence.

Chapter 1

Why This Book had to be Written

To answer this question, one will have to go back a little bit to the year 2010: UPA 2 had been in power for a year or so, with a consolidated majority in the Parliament. However, it looked increasingly rudderless. Moreover, with a slew of scams coming out in the open, and Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh’s eerie silence over them, the image of the government was vastly tarnished.

The 2G Scam was particularly disturbing, considering the involvement of foreign players in a sector as sensitive as telecom, and its inescapable implications on national security. The Coal Scam was another case in point. That these scams happened right under the nose of an ‘honest’ PM caused much anguish to citizens.

As a conscientious writer, it was difficult for me to remain unaffected by these gargantuan scams, which seemed to enjoy the government’s complicity. Moreover, the Congress-style of governance naturally bred and encouraged corruption of the worst kinds; in fact, the loot of central government had begun to be considered an accepted form of political funding.

The country’s principal opposition party, the BJP, was sadly going through a tough phase during this time. After the 2009 defeat, it was still struggling to get its act together. These scams provided the party with an opportunity to bounce back. Under its new president, Nitin Gadkari, the BJP was making the right moves in that direction.

For me, there was a larger thought at play. I firmly believed that the country needed an alternative political discourse which the BJP was more capable of providing. The Congress is a party where leaders are parachuted down by the high command. Hence, their experience of having worked on the ground is minimal. At the same time, they lack the fire in their belly to work hard, as they know that the top leadership would anyway be concentrated in the first family. The BJP, on the other hand, is made up largely of self-made leaders who have come up the hard way, some having spent their initial years putting up party posters or cycling down door to door for campaigning. As such they are more ambitious and aspirational for themselves, the party and the nation.

This explains the most crucial difference in the work culture of the two parties. As an aspiring first-generation politician, my preference, thus, had its rationale.

In July 2010, I met Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, the then political advisor to Nitin Gadkari, and offered my support to the party. We had a couple of brainstorming meetings in the aftermath. And that’s where Vinay ji came up with an interesting idea: ‘We are already fighting the war against corruption. But the larger challenge is to change the political discourse of the country…We have to move from politics of corruption to politics of good governance. Development has to be the keyword.’

Vijay Sahasrabuddhe suggested the idea of a book that would bring out the party president’s vision of development. He acquainted me with some of the path-breaking social entrepreneurship initiatives which Nitin Gadkari had carried out around Nagpur, especially the remarkable waste management plan of the Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC), which was conceived by Gadkari and of how he had espoused solar energy and bio-fuel in every way he could. I had my initial doubts about whether I should take up the project. I decided I would make a trip to Nagpur before taking the final decision.

I subsequently made that trip to get a first-hand perspective of these initiatives. What I saw there left me thoroughly impressed.

India Aspires: Redefining the Politics of Development talks about Nitin Gadkari’s ideas for a developed India. The book, co-authored by me, was first released in October 2013. Subsequently, the Hindi version was released in August 2015 by BJP President, Shri Amit Shah and Union Home Minister Shri Rajnath Singh.

India Aspires got an amazing response from readers, most of whom were unaware about Gadkari’s ambitious development initiatives. The book delves into a wide range of topics from solar energy to bio-fuel, economic policies, infrastructure and waste management. It lays out a roadmap for transforming India.

As this was a first book on Gadkari in English, it reached a wide audience outside his home state. In fact, Gadkari himself is so proud of the book that he nearly gave it as a gift to almost every MP: ‘Young MPs have told me there’s so much to learn from my work. I feel humbled. In fact, President Pranab Mukherjee too was very impressed with the book and had kind words for it,’ gushes Gadkari.

Interestingly, when Arvind Kejriwal met Gadkari to apologise in an out-of-court settlement for making some inappropriate charges of financial misappropriation against him, the conversation is said to have ended with Gadkari giving Kejriwal the book, and adding: ‘Read it and try to understand what I stand for.’

In 2014, when the NDA government came to power, Gadkari assumed the charge of the Road Transport and Highways (RTH) and Shipping Ministries. And as time went by, thanks to a slew of groundbreaking initiatives in all his three ministries, Gadkari emerged among the best performing ministers of the Modi Government.

Under Gadkari, the pace of highways road construction has gone up exponentially. From a 4,260 km total road construction in the country in 2013-14, the total road construction in 2017-18 went up to 9,829 km, which set a new record for road construction in India. The per day road construction figure in 2017-18 stood at 26.92 km, which is more than double the average road construction per day between 2009-13.

The shipping sector too has seen unprecedented changes and new initiatives, which includes more than one hundred archaic laws being reviewed or scrapped, the launch of India’s most ambitious port-led development programme, Sagar Mala, and the opening of Indian waterways as a potential means of alternate transportation.

Moreover, for the first time, the government has accorded road safety the importance it deserves.

All these have been made possible through the Honourable Minister’s hands-on approach. Transparency, simplification of processes and a strong tracking mechanism have been key facilitators.

It was in one of our late evening conversations at his official bungalow that the idea of India Inspires emerged.

India Aspires was Gadkari’s vision of development as the party president of BJP. The remarkable work which Gadkari did as the Minister of RTHS rightly merited another book. ‘Aap likhiye isko…’ he enthused, after a late evening conversation.

Hence, India Inspires is a natural corollary of India Aspires. It talks about how unconventional thinking and unbridled passion can induce game-changing results in a ministry that has largely remained un-inspiring through most prime ministers. It goes behind the scenes to chronicle an infrastructural revolution that has been taking place quietly since 2014.

Chapter 2

Who is Nitin Gadkari?

Nitin Gadkari was born into an agricultural family in the early years of our independence. Like millions of other families, his relatives basked in the hopes and aspirations of our young nation. Despite having their own house as well as farming land, the financial condition of his family was unstable. This, however, never prevented Gadkari’s mother, who has left a huge influence on his life, from helping the needy. Therefore, while this cut a hole in their already meagre resources, they were happy helping the even lesser privileged—a habit and philosophy that Gadkari inherited and practised unflinchingly as he grew up.

To understand Gadkari’s success as a politician and his unconventional approach, one will need to take a detour and understand him first as a person. That will allow us to understand the reason for his success and ascertain what really makes him stand apart.

By the early seventies however, the optimism of the initial years of independence was replaced with chaos and uncertainty. The events of that phase triggered our first realisation that there was perhaps something terribly amiss with our plans for development.

Our progress had thus far been lopsided, and the result was that amenities, especially in rural India, remained unavailable while unemployment across the country became a scourge. Disappointment was building up in various sections of the society. The imposition of the Emergency only precipitated the angst of a betrayed populace. The extent of excesses carried out by the government shook Gadkari out of his comfort zone. As a student, he aggressively campaigned against the Emergency.

In those days, he got closely involved with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), taking to social work in a big way. Gadkari was particularly inspired by the RSS founder K.B. Hedgewar’s ideals of humanity and nation-building.

Certain political developments can leave a strong impact on an individual. Gadkari soon realised that the Emergency had changed his approach to life. Had there been no Emergency, he would have gone on to become a lawyer and been happily in practice. The Emergency made him conscious of the need to fight for the democratic rights of citizens.

The Emergency was thus a turning point in Gadkari’s life. His active participation in politics began in those days and there has since been no looking back.

An endearing feature which guides his political life has been to try and improve the life of the most underprivileged. Antyodaya, as we call it, stands for the eradication of abject poverty, the provision of basic necessities to every Indian family and the assurance that the last man in society gets the first opportunity to rise in life. This is what Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, Deendayal Upadhyaya and other saintly figures in India had emphasised. Gandhi’s principle of trusteeship and Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay’s concept of integrated humanism are philosophies that deeply inspired Gadkari’s thought process.

Gadkari realised very early in his political career that the biggest impediment in our path towards prosperity had been the sheer absence of political will. The inertia or inability of our political class to engineer changes in the existing order had led to stagnation, where even smaller third-world countries had surged ahead of us.

Gadkari’s first opportunity to try and change an outdated system came his way in 1995. As the minister for the Public Works Department (PWD) of Maharashtra, he was dismayed by the poor road connectivity to villages that was the sad state of affairs even after five decades of Independence. One of the first tasks he undertook was to provide all-weather road connectivity to the 13,736 villages in Maharashtra. Given how meagre the annual budget of the Ministry was, had he depended upon the allotted amount, the task would not have been completed in 350 years. Unconventional, out-of-the-box thinking was needed to draw the funds necessary for the purpose.

Gadkari’s quest for solutions led him to adopt the Public Private Partnership (PPP) model, popularly known as Build, Operate and Transfer (BOT) in order to execute several development projects. This concept, popular in Western countries but frowned upon by Indian politicians, not only improved major arterial roads connecting cities but also allowed the release of a huge amount of funds earmarked for such roads to be used for rural road development. The concept was instrumental in making the Mumbai-Pune Expressway and fifty-five flyovers in Mumbai, a reality in record time. Later, the same model was employed elsewhere into what we now identify as the ‘Golden Quadrilateral’ and many more projects by the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) on one side and ‘Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana’ on the other. Needless to say, all projects that Gadkari undertook as the PWD Minister were carried out with utmost transparency while adhering to the highest standards of integrity. In fact, the Bandra-Worli Sea Link was conceived during Gadkari’s tenure and was meant to cost Rs.420 crores. Unfortunately, by the time the successive governments finally completed it, the cost had escalated by four times.

Gadkari’s remarkable achievements as the PWD Minister of Maharashtra between 1996 and 1999 rightly earned him the title of ‘infrastructure man’. When Gadkari became the RTH and Shipping Minister in 2014, those who had closely followed his career knew that infrastructure revolution was in the offing.

The total road construction awarded in 2013-14 was 3,620 km; it went up to 17,055 km in 2017-18. The total constructed road which stood at 4,260 km in