Infra promises are made only to be broken

I know one-line questions are not common in Parliament, but suppose I was to get a chance to ask a question to the lawmakers, who all claim that infrastructure is their top priority, here is what I would ask:

Which are the country's 10 largest infrastructure projects and what is their current status?

Based on the trend of replies that one sees, the answer would either be an assurance from one of the ministries -- "The information is being collected and will be laid on the table of the house. . . or a long-winding evasive explanation which would read something like this:

"As the finance minister said in his Budget speech earlier this month, the investment in infrastructure is critical for the growth of the economy. . .The government is committed to ensuring that sufficient funds are made available for this sector. .  .You may also be aware that to stimulate public investment in infrastructure, the government had set up the India Infrastructure Finance Company Ltd as a special purpose vehicle for providing long-term funding. . ." and so on.

It is unlikely that such a list of projects or their status would be available, but it is equally unlikely that the answer would say so.

The Planning Commission does not have such a list readily available and neither does the ministry of statistics and programme implementation, since it only tracks central sector projects, and we are yet to see what the newly set-up delivery monitoring unit under the PMO and the Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure throws up.

Of course, there is a rough working list of the country's largest infrastructure projects available with officials and their status is also available -- in a disaggregated form -- with their specific parent ministries.

Just for the record, the largest infrastructure project is the dedicated freight corridor project, where the last cost estimate is a whopping Rs 70,000 crore (Rs 700 billion). It is all set to breach its original completion date of 2017.

Then there are the ultra mega power projects of 4,000 Mw each, of which three have been bagged by Reliance Power -- at Sasan (Madhya Pradesh), Krishnapatnam (Andhra Pradesh) and Tilaiya (Jharkhand). Tata Power has bagged the project at Mundra in Gujarat. Throw in the some of the large metro projects -- like the one in Hyderabad which is being rebid -- and your list is ready.

There are two points that I wish to raise here. Firstly, there seems to be a strong case for reviewing the quality of the hundreds of questions and answers that are tabled in Parliament.

Should there be a more stringent quality control on what can be asked, given the time, money and effort it takes to put together an answer, and can answers be a mere repetition of stated policy, or an attempt at obfuscation of facts? Should questions be asked for information that is readily and easily available on the ministry's website?

You could get a rough idea of the cost of these questions from an estimate worked out by the House of Commons in the UK, since such data is not available for India. The average cost of answering a written question was 149 pounds (about Rs 12,000) and 410 pounds (about Rs 33,000) for an oral question in December 2008.

The second point is that we certainly need to review the way we monitor projects. There is no dearth of status reports out there. For instance, you can get an exhaustive list of all the major power projects at various stages of construction which reflect nothing more than a wishful targeting of the completion date.

A more realistic assessment of project progress is needed which obviously needs to be accompanied by action to remove the roadblocks as well as penalise those responsible. We cannot allow shadow-boxing to substitute real action.

As per the questions list available on their websites, there are 205 questions slated to be answered in the written format in the Lok Sabha today and 155 in the Rajya Sabha. This is in addition to 20 starred questions in each of the houses which are to be answered orally.

You may want to keep track of this question on infrastructure in the Rajya Sabha list today which asks whether 'the government is considering plans to tap idle money lying with households and elsewhere, primarily to fund development of infrastructure', a sector which requires 'as high as $750 billion. . .' in funding.

Image: People carry umbrellas on a rainy day through a waterlogged street in Mumbai. | Photograph: Arko Datta/Reuters