Kerala cabinet goes to IIM to crack governance puzzle

Updated on: Monday, August 22, 2011

If management is all about efficient use of resources, there would be few states in India that would need a crash course like Kerala, given its wealth of human and other resources and questionable use of the same. On Thursday, therefore, Chief Minister Oommen Chandy and his cabinet colleagues parked themselves at the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode (IIM-K), for a full-day programme rightly titled "Governance Insights for Transformation" (GIFT).

Their reason to be taking management lessons could not have been driven home better than the state of roads from Thrissur to Kozhikode: Fast-passenger buses of the hugely loss-making Kerala State Road Transport Corporation take about four hours to do the crater-filled 120 km stretch. The state's NRIs (Non Resident Indians) who number a few million, would vouch that the Dubai-Kochi flight takes only a shade over three hours, while the 200-odd kms from the airport to Pathanamthitta takes roughly five hours.

Chandy and his cabinet colleagues showed good attitude by turning up at the campus on time, and then switching off their mobile phones for the classes before the team led by IIM-K Director Debashish Chatterjee took over, leading them through the learning verticals.

The topics covered included agriculture (which Kerala has long deserted, with palatial, petro-dollar funded homes having usurped paddy fields), information technology (in which the state is a poor fourth to its southern neighbours Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh), environment (on which hinges the state's future in tourism), investment, and health and education (where early accolades are being replaced by brickbats).

The cabinet was explained the context of the programme by Prof. Saji Gopinath who pitched Kerala's place in the India growth story, with statistics. They were then given insights on the investment climate in Kerala by Prof. Chandrajit Bannerjee, while Prof. Unnikrishnan impressed on them the need to build a culture of performance.

The 'students' would have munched particularly long on building a culture of performance, considering that many of the state's projects have remained on paper for years together, including the Vizhinjam container transhipment project, the Kochi metro rail, the SmartCity, and the north-south expressway project. The metro, SmartCity and expressway projects date back to the previous UDF government's tenure, while it is over a century since the Vizhinjam project was first mooted.

Chatterjee told ET that the CM was happy that his team got such a "wealth of ideas" in a day, and that the IIM-K team, too, learned a few things from the leaders, including the complexity of a day in the life of a chief minister. He advised the CM that governance ought to look at the next generation rather than the next election, considering that the new generation was making history rather than dwelling on the past.

The organisers preferred to call the programme, "Kerala, a gift unopened". Chandy would be in total agreement, considering that the state receives roughly Rs. 20,000 crore (Rs. 200 billion) in annual NRI remittances and recently stumbled upon an estimated Rs. 1 trillion worth of wealth in the cellars of the Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple in the state capital, neither of which can be unlocked by the state government.

Chandy and his team had the job of figuring that out with their newly acquired management tips while their convoy negotiated the decrepit roads back from Kozhikode.

Kerala cabinet goes to IIM to crack governance puzzle

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