Introduction

A village farmer in a small village somewhere in rural Andhra Pradesh (a state in southern India) watches hopelessly as his water pump refuses to work. He realizes that the power to his fields has been cut off since he has not paid his electricity bill. He must take the bus to go to the nearest city to the Electricity Department and pay the bill. Doing that, he is asked to wait in a long line and then to fill out a multitude of separate forms and submit them to separate offices in the building. It is a good thing that he has done all this before and he knows the drill, because otherwise it would take him the better part of the day just to understand the entire process. Having filled out the necessary forms, he discovers that one of the offices where t h e form is to be submitted has closed for lunch and he must wait. Since our farmer must catch the bus in time to get back home, he cant wait around for the office to reopen. Thus he pays off the clerk outside the office to submit his form and money once the office reopens. He finally manages to return home just before sunset and hopes that his water pump would come back on.

This is a similar story faced by most people in India today where an obscenely large bureaucracy has created a system wherein it tak es a million forms filled out in triplicate to achieve a simple task such as paying one's bill. The bureaucrats support and continue to extend this system as they stand the most to gain from such a relaxed environment and the obvious bribes that are involved. However, one man hopes to change all that by bringing in Hi-Tech.

Nara Chandrababu Naidu, Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, has brought in a host of ambitious projects aimed at 'wiring up' the entire government and thereby computerizing the entire state. An economics Ph.D. graduate, Naidu is popularly called the CEO of Andhra Pradesh as he tends to manage the state more as a corporation and less as any other state in India. Naidu himself has claimed that, "My style of functioning is more akin to that of a CEO than a Chief Minister," (Business Standard, Delhi March, 13, 1997, pg.4). Naidu is famous for carrying around his IBM ThinkPad with him everywhere he goes and accessing online information wherever he is. For example, he checks the status of electricity in the state every morning. He has a program which gives him detailed and up-to-date information on the number of power plants running, their output, the distribution, and other such information. This is just one example of the type of info r mation he has online access to. He plans to extend this to all departments of the government and make them get the most out of the instant access to information. He has yet another ambitious plan. He hopes to get all government workings computerized an d setup a state-wide computer network. This means good news to our farmer wanting to pay his bill. Now, he could go to a local workstation and access and print the form from the network and perhaps even pay his bill online. All this would mean great sav ings in time and money for the farmer and other common citizens like him.

However, this is not all that good news for the government clerk at the Electricity Department who benefited from the payoffs that he received. Also, a great fear exists amongst the working or blue-collar class that computers may take away their jobs from them. They fear that they may become redundant from the advent of computers just as quite a few bureaucrats might. This is not good news for Naidu who hopes to keep his office fo llowing the elections later this year. Naidu must justify the amount of money spent on his industrialization and computerization projects and try to woo back the voters. Hence my thesis follows.

Thesis

Chandrababu Naidu will be promoting his past plans and act ions in terms of the computerization by demonstrating its usefulness to the average citizen. Since he faces a large and politically strong force in the form of the bureaucracy and public sector unions, Naidu has a difficult task ahead of him to try to lobby against them. Naidu must also try to convince the lower classes of his intent and show that his actions stand to benefit them directly and are not for the upper class only. Along with this, Naidu is going to have to implement policies which can be considered populist and perhaps not quite as rational in terms of Naidu's overall plans. However, one must be careful to use the word populist as it might connote a negative policy. I will discuss this in another part of this site. Finally, such policies spark a discussion on the politics of Andhra Pradesh and India in general. The situation that prevails at the current time is reflective of the situation in many states of India and parallels can be easily drawn.

Outline

In the part on Populist Measures, I will briefly describe what has come about to be considered as populist in developing countries and especially India. I will also go into certain aspects peculiar to Indian politics and how Naidu must follow along with them. In the next part on Accomplishments, it is important to see what Naidu has accomplished in his years of office and where they stand currently. It should explain where these projects stand along with the problems that some of these have faced. Finally, the section on Current Actions delves on two things. Firstly, on what Naidu has done in recent times seeing the elections are not too far away. And secondly, on what sort of things we can expect him to do.