'Deleting the delay button’ -An Approach adopted by Ministry of Environment

All project leaders wish to delete the word ‘delay’. It affects project cost, worker morale, quality of completed project and industry reputation. If delay arises due to Environmental ministry, it scares them the most. Recently Prakash Javadeker, Minister of Environment & Forests said that the word ‘delay’ is deleted by his ministry by speeding up the approval process in the past three months. But this has been seen as an assault on the greens from nature conservationists. On a positive side it’s a dream come true for project leaders of national highways, hydropower, mining, irrigation, oil & gas, railways, power, defense, and manufacturing sector. Is delete button becoming synonymous with ‘Minimum Governance’?.   

But, on 25^th August 2014, Supreme Court has given the first jolt to the NDA government for altering the composition of National Board of Wildlife (NBW) and its standing Committee. An open published letter is addressed to the Prime Minister by NBW on 12^th Sep 2014. It acts as a reminder for him to make good of his own message - “Zero defect and zero effect”. Letter literally opens up the Pandora box of its own non-compliance: (1) number of current board member present (11) versus needed (47); (2) bypassing of Section 5(A) norms of Wildlife Protection Act (WPA).(3) In two sessions, 133 development projects were cleared and pronounced environmental friendly cleared out of 160 assessed. Was that a sign of superman project leader or the avoidance of fear of complexity involved in evaluating the projects.?

It’s an excellent Project leader skill to remove bottlenecks. But shortage of ecology experts in the EC panel should not be used as a safety buffer in front of bottleneck. Bottleneck is generally removed by putting more resources, leaning, standardizing, fool proofing, flexible resourcing, or job levelling etc. Whichever approach thy use, even then the required number of resources - ecology experts - is needed for evaluation, acceptance / rejection.

An insight from an operation management perspective warns of common misunderstanding between ‘removing of bottleneck’ and ‘changing of bottleneck’. Both are different. The happiness of quickly removing the bottleneck changes immediately into sorrow on seeing new bottlenecks emerging. For example, Professors are facing problems in imparting higher knowledge to undergraduate students. Especially in courses which demands knowledge of basic science and mathematics fundamentals. But unfortunately those fundamentals skills were delivered in speed in school. The school teachers can’t fail students. Why? Because the bottleneck ‘fail option’ was ‘deleted’ by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). Result - School system has simply increased the speed of delivering skills no matter they are fit or not for college education. Schools deliberately forget that they are connected with college in this ‘value chain of education’. It seems bottleneck in developing skill is always changing its form in education sector.

Statistics on the government website (www.forestsclearance.nic.in) tells that 80 projects were submitted after 15^th July 2014 and 72 (90%) are already under examination. Another government website (environmentclearance.nic.in) that 688 projects were submitted in 2014 alone so far. On a contrasting note, if we look at the data from 2004 to 2013, on an average 1700 projects sought for environmental clearances 

(EC) every year. But only 534 projects ( 3%) got EC certificate till 4^th August 2014.  This approval rate reminds me of an event when we played musical chairs. One of the participants was the slowest. Others were eventually slowed down as rule doesn’t allow overtaking the other. Gutsy members in the heat of frustration overtook the bottleneck member. But they observed that they are still behind that slowest person. They have to break the rule again and again to be fast. But in the end, they all lost the game and miraculously the winner was the slowest participant - ‘bottleneck winner’.

Can we say that our previous Ministry office was like that bottleneck winner playing with similar strategy. The previous Ministry was crawling forward at the speed of 3 files /year. And can we say that this new Ministry office by running at a speed of 65 projects cleared / meeting, is a symbol of minimum governance. The pros and cons are many for both minimum and maximum governance but we hope that by deleting the delay button, we don’t manufacture more disasters like that of in Uttarakhand and Jammu & Kashmir.  Demand for EC certificate is very high by all Industrialists but we should ensure that the supply of certificates should not transform into orders to Indian army to rescue during floods.