Future Ready Governance for 21st Century India - Foresight Makes The Difference
In the past 70 years, the country’s economy, despite three wars and several bouts of famine, has grown steadily as has the health and education of its inhabitants. The uncertain future of $2 billion GE diesel locomotive plant presents an illustration to underline anticipatory planning for capital intensive and multi-year projects.
The proposal to set up a high-power diesel locomotive plant in India was made by the railways in September 2006 and GE was awarded the contract in November 2015. The railways will pay GE Rs 14,656 crore for assured off-take of 1,000 engines apart from Rs 2,228-crore as a maintenance fee, a total of $2 billion over 11 years. It was understood that the railways would go in for near-100% electrification of its network and thus, this plant under construction became superfluous to its needs. An agreement for electric locomotives had already been signed with another company but since the contract was already awarded, the government had no option but to honour it.
The Comptroller & Auditor General of India (CAG) also pointed out in its audit report on railways for 2016-17 that the diesel locomotive manufacturing unit is not aligned with the plan of the Indian Railways to maximise electric operations. The CAG report further noted that the diesel locomotives already available with the railways are sufficient to take care of the present needs.
A foresight study during the period of negotiations (over 10 years) would have shown the futility of this large investment which the Railway in its present financial crisis is saddled with and would have thrown up warning signals much earlier to the final commitment.
It is not that the government does not have institutions which undertake Anticipatory studies and research. For example, expertise is available with Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC), whose services could have been utilized for horizon scanning before taking an investment decision involving hundreds of millions of dollars.
This is just to show that long range planning backed-up with anticipatory approach is essential in a country’s growth. For long-range planning spanning 10-50 years, the country’s policy makers must have systems to look into the distant future, prepare a multidisciplinary radar, capture weak signals, interpret & analyse these and create several scenarios which are likely to develop. As time passes and more concrete data is available, certain options become more feasible than others and planning can take a more definite shape. This whole process is known as foresight.
Foresight is the process of anticipation that identify opportunities and threats in mid-term to long-term future. Critical thinking is the skill for asking questions. Before you can solve a problem, you must be able to critically analyse and question what is causing it.
The future is not pre-determined or predicable and complete information about the future is never fully available. Therefore, it makes sense to look for ways to understand the future to deal with uncertainty. All our knowledge is about the past, but all our decisions are about the future. We create our future by what we do or don’t do today; it makes sense to try and understand it as best as we can.
To build an anticipatory infrastructure to take Indian public governance into the 21st century planning & decision-making process require both skills and budgets. Foresight systems which are effective and resilient, consists of information generation and management process. It generally consists of three elements:
Foresight activity starts with horizon scanning. Horizon scanning, also known as environmental scanning, is a method for detecting early or weak signals in the wider environment to identify potential threats, risks, emerging issues and new opportunities. The aim is to produce a volume of information about the future.
It has often been shown in studies that experts and consultants are less likely to provide information and data about the distant future. For the past 20 years, The Economist has kept a database of projections by banks and consultancies for annual GDP growth. It now contains 100,000 forecasts across 15 countries. In general, they fared well over brief time periods, but got very inaccurate, the further the analysts peered into the future.
The future is made up of a complex web of technological, economic, social, political and environmental changes. In VUCA, these changes accelerate and form complex relationships with each other. For example, environmental changes are influenced by economic, political and technological changes. The next step, interpreting data and formulating a library of approaches to the future, generally consists of applying a combination of foresight techniques and practices.
The final and often most challenging phase is developing agile recommendations that could aid the decision-makers, in its planning. It has been practised in the military & intelligence agencies for decades. The objective of foresight developed through horizon scanning is not to predict the future, which is simply not possible for complex socio-economic systems but to monitor signals and fine-tune various options. These options are in the shape of scenarios about the future, many too farfetched to be called “ridiculous”. Most scenarios will be discarded so the Futurists (group of employees given this task), will regularly test assumptions and patterns to find the few that will evolve into positive or certain trends.
Therefore, to understand and interpret the wide gamut of signals, bureaucrats must be trained in critical thinking, which is one of the survival skills for the VUCA world.
For example, we woke up to Electric Vehicles (EV) only around 2018 when Niti Aayog produced a paper on the changeover to EV. EV has been around for at least 50 years and even if we have initiated R&D on batteries, charging stations etc. 20 years back, when strong signals were detected, by now, we would have the entire technology in place.
Governments in the VUCA age must prepare themselves for both the slow-moving future as electric vehicles have been developing for the past 50 years and the unpredictable such as Covid19. Long-term threats and complex challenges are all around us. As seen in the cases described above, government planning must adopt an anticipatory long-term approach and ensure that government planning continues to sustain and evolve into the 21st century.
