Goa needs a new way of governance and a new blueprint to deliver promises

While the next fortnight will be all about winning elections, this is not too soon to look the kind of governance  that Goa will need, which will be a marked shift from the way the state has been governed for so long.

The party which is voted to power, irrespective of whether they have been in power before or not, needs to change the very nature of its governance to make it bottom up. Therefore Goa actually needs a change of governance.

But to do this there needs to be a movement about how the vehicles for delivery of governance are chosen. Firstly, the flab of the government has to be cut drastically. The size of the cabinet should be no more than four ministers. The government's vision needs to be transmitted to departments run by a reshaped and recharged bureaucracy, who only job will be to take feedback from domain experts in every fields who will function as a backroom apparatus, the war and vision room of the government, as it were. And this has to be the game changer.

What the state needs and how this has to be delivered cannot be left at the hands of the Chief Minister and the cabinet. Of course they have the right to take that final call or a decision on file, through an elaborate process, that has to be put in place before the file reaches the government. Across health, education, industry, mining, infrastructure, agriculture, environment, planning, sports etc, a team of professionals, especially those who have worked or served in those areas, either in government, academia and private sector, need to be handpicked from across the country or even the world.

Global Goans should be the first target of this talent hunt. The need to bring back such talent home is vital but this will happen only if those returning are made to feel that they are coming back to a Goa, which is not just changing but that they will be the architects of this change. These professionals/ experts will then have to work on the vision document of the party in power and draw up a time-bound blue print for delivery. Adequate time then needs to be given for wide ranging public consultations  on each of the points in  the ruling party’s vision document. Once the road map for implementing  the points on the vision document is ready, they can be shared with ministers  so that matters which need  legislative debate and sanction can be presented and debated in an informed manner.

The next stage is passing of laws which need to be passed and the executive action that needs to be taken. A hand-picked bureaucracy, not necessarily IAS officers, needs to then execute, with the ministers giving finishing touches.

This will keep politics out of governance. And this can be done only when a mechanism like this is etched in stone and gets legislative sanction. Neither can zero-tolerance to corruption and more importantly zero-tolerance to inefficiency, be a reality unless the state ensures this. This should be institutionalised so that even weak political links cannot break it.

The success of new Governance that Goa hopes to see will lie in how it makes ministers have a hands off approach till it comes to them for policy sanction, so that those who know better than then can do their work.