R. B SURI
By keeping Haseeb Drabu as the Finance Minister of J and K, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed Chief Minister J and K has done a very good thing in accepting the Principle of Right job for right person and right person for the right job. He is an innovative person and is well acquainted with the fiscal affairs of the global economy.
He is a straight forward and methodical person of high integrity in the monetary affairs of the State at the moment .
In 2014, he formally joined PDP and contested the State elections on the party ticket from his home constituency Raj pora, winning it with a big margin. During the last one decade the Finance Ministry of J and K State was being manned by the stalwarts such as A.R Rather, M. H Baig and for a very small period Tariq Hamid Karra having the legal background academically . Particularly during the reins of Omar Abdullah, a financial mess was created as if finance vehicle was without any driver on the road. The financial mess was so bad that the old liabilities which entangled the BJP and PDP coalition Government are more then Rs 9,500 crore. Haseeb Ahmed Drabu is an Indian economist and the Finance Minister of Jammu and Kashmir. He was the Chairman and CEO of Jammu and Kashmir Bank from 2005 to 2010. Drabu received a PhD in Economics from Centre for Development Studies (Trivandrum), Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.
Drabu started his career with the Government of India in 1990, first with the Perspective Planning Division of the Planning Commission of India, then as a consultant to the Economic Advisory Council of the Prime Minister and finally with the Tenth Finance Commission. He then joined the media and became an editor at Business Standard, where he set up a research bureau. Subsequently, he served as a consultant to the Asian Development Bank (ADB). After the 2002 state elections, a PDP-Led Coalition State Government (in alliance with the Indian National Congress) came to power in Jammu and Kashmir and appointed Drabu as its economic advisor in January 2003. He planned the tax reforms, methods of expenditure compression and attempted to reduce the debt stock of the State Government. He was simultaneously appointed as the Chairman and CEO of Jammu and Kashmir Bank by the PDP – Congress Government in 2005.
In the 2008 State elections, the PDP was defeated and the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference came to power by making the INC as the alliance partner and formed the new Coalition Govt in J&K. Although the Congress was again a part of this new Coalition Govt (becoming the junior partner of NC in 2008, as opposed to of PDP in 2002 ), Drabu, a long-time loyalist / fan of PDP Supremo Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, was forced to resign from his position in J&K Bank by the new Chief Minister Omar Abdullah.
After a long spell, J and K State is lucky to have a Finance Minister having rich experience in the economic field of the global economy as such whatever Drabu will do to the best of his ability for the economic betterment of J and K will be appreciated by the people of the State. This tenure of Mufti is going to be the best one as he is having Drabu as his FM and his wave length matches with him.
In a decent way budget of the State for the 2015-16 was presented in the J and K Legislative Assembly by the Finance Minister Haseeb Drabu who is also a prominent economist of the country. For getting the same passed from the Legislatures, he advanced sufficient reasoning,while replying to the various cut motions and the other questions and connected supplementary .During his budget speech in the J and K legislative Assembly while presenting the Budget for 2015-16, he expressed and strongly pleaded for out sourcing of Lakhanpur Toll Plaza to a well reputed agency or a concern instead of manning the same on our own as the practice is in currency at the moment and the same be made to halt at this stage only without further loss of time. The present system is full of controversies and den of corruption as the blue eyed officers and the officials are deployed at Lakhanpur Toll plaza which is considered to be the prize posting and breeds corruption and there is no end to it. Greedy officers of the State Government keep their eyes on Lakhanpur posting and the corrupt ministers and the bureaucrats oblige them against consideration only. If Drabu succeeds in getting his proposal through from the Cabinet, it will be considered as the ‘Panacea for all diseases’. With this, corruption will be totally finished at this site and the entire staff deployed over there will become totally free and would be used in the departments judiciously where there is shortage of manpower. Not only this, according to him by doing so the State Government would get the 300-400 crores of rupees as revenues in excess of the sum being realised as the revenues at the moment. I am sure that by using his extraordinary skill and expertise, he will overcome all the difficulties pertaining to the defects and the irregularities made by the Omar’s Government in the past in mishandling the fiscal affairs of the State. At the moment, he is making the in depth analysis of the things minutely from 2009-2015 which he inherited from the previous Government led by Omar Abdullah. He will clear the financial mess certainly. His first endeavor should be to restore the creditability of the all the treasuries in the State forthwith thereby improving the liquidity position and the flow of cash therein. He should himself or by his trusted second in command, monitor the liquidity position of all the treasuries on daily basis without fail. He should try his best to establish strict financial discipline in all the DDOs offices in the entire State. And at the same time, all concerned at the helm of the financial affairs of the State be made clear in unequivocal terms the delinquent, if any will not go scot free. It is worth mentioning here that there are certain departments in the Government for getting the job of works of Rs. 1 crore out of the capital component of the plan, the departments are spending Rs. 8 crore on the salary and wages of the employees working in the department concerned. Being a Finance Minister of the State, he should try to obtain the relevant information from the concerned departments for their logical conclusions forthwith. Seeing the sensitivity of the present economic scenario and the departmental position viz-a-viz its performance and if below average should be closed immediately treating it as a white elephant in the government set up. It is also important to mention based on the input available, that the State Government is keen to outsource the police recruitments of constabulary in J and K Police and its allied segments such as JKAP , IRP, SPOs etc. etc. This has come in the media in the past. Such thinking in the government shall certainly yield some thing concrete in the days to come.
The Coalition Government of PDP and BJP is in place since 1st March in J and K and functioning smoothly as is evident from the fact that it has successfully convened a Budget Session of the J and K Legislative Assembly and the Council as well. It remained on decadron – a life saving drug for a fortnight . The head of the government made a very controversial statement stating therein that the Assembly elections in the State could be successfully completed by the support of Pakistan, separatists, hard core agencies existing in the Valley . From 18th March onwards, it actually started functioning in the right perspective in accordance with the principles of the established parliamentary democracy in the country like other states. From the transactional analysis of the events in the past after this government came into power , it is on record that PDP is on the run towards its mission but painful to observe that BJPs initiatives are to the minimum extent . At the same time there are certain compulsions for both the partners to carry on the State of affairs. But Mufti is on the plus side as compared to BJP which is maintaining low profile and has raised its feet from the ground and allowed to keep the same above the ground feeling helpless and waiting for the time to come to go with the direction of the air.