A law student’s question at a drug seminar went viral because it sounded like an accusation. It was a design question — and a gazette notification has just tried to answer it.

March 2024. At a drug-awareness seminar organised by my bureau on the Rai campus of IIT Delhi in Sonipat, a law student from Dr. B.R. Ambedkar National Law University rose to speak before the police officials present. Students of four universities were in the room. Ganja, he said, was as easy to buy near his campus as toffees. If a first-year student could trace the dealer, why could the police not? There was a police post, he added, right in front of his university. The hall cheered. The video went viral.

By evening the comment sections had delivered their verdict: connivance. I understand why. But I headed that bureau, and I can offer a different account, less sinister and more useful. The state is not looking away. It is arranged so that no single part of it owns the whole of the question the student asked.

The same suspicion met me across the state. At a roadside dhaba near Murthal the owner once came and stood by my table. Students arrive late at night, he said, girls among them, drunk, and some on something more. He was lodging a complaint with the state in the person of the nearest officer. Beneath his words was the student’s question: you all know, and nothing moves.

WHY NOBODY OWNS IT

The arrangement is older than most of us. Since Independence, state governments have run on the Secretary-Director model. The secretariat frames policy and advises the minister. The directorates run the schools, hospitals and police stations.

Thinking and doing were kept apart so each could check the other, and for a younger republic’s simpler tasks the design served honourably. But it had a quiet side-effect. Each half could, in good faith, point to the other: the scheme was sanctioned, the funds were awaited. The file completed its journey. The problem stayed put.

The minister, meanwhile, is served by both and told, in the end, by neither. His two filters report their own activity: circulars, budgets, camps. Both reports are true. Neither says whether the thing is working. So he often learns it where the citizen always knew it, at the election, and the verdict falls on the name on the ballot. No one intended this. It is what the architecture produces when nobody is watching the whole.

A drug problem exposes the design like nothing else, because the problem is horizontal and government is vertical. Prevention sits in Education, treatment in Health, enforcement with the police, the errant chemist with the food and drugs administration, the messaging with public relations.

At the bureau we ran online campaigns that belonged to the PR department. We carried escape-room exercises into classrooms that were Education’s domain. No department was shirking. But no desk anywhere was answerable for the one question the student had asked. Activity has many fathers. The outcome had no address.

The Centre saw the pattern a decade ago. PRAGATI, running since 2015, puts the Prime Minister, union secretaries and chief secretaries before one screen, one project at a time. Fifty meetings have reviewed more than 3,300 projects, and the Prime Minister has encouraged states to build similar mechanisms for the social sector. Its strength is that the outcome reaches the head of the table unfiltered. Its limit is the calendar. A monthly review is a searchlight, and between sweeps old habits find the dark.

WHAT HARYANA HAS TRIED

Haryana has now carried the idea a step further, and I write with an interest declared: the gazette names me to run it. On September 28 the state constituted the SANKALP Society as the nodal body on drugs.

The Chief Minister is in the chair. Twelve secretaries sit on one governing body, answerable together. A full-time chief executive heads a monthly executive committee of their departments’ directors general. Secretariat and directorate, the halves the old model kept apart, now share one table and one target, with the one person every secretary answers to presiding.

The order allows no more than three priority deliverables a year, each with a measurable target and a named responsible department. Progress is the first item of business at every meeting, and the annual report goes to the Council of Ministers. The first target is the student’s question made into a number: fewer first-time users under twenty-five, district by district, against a fixed baseline.

THE TEST

I carry no illusions. I have watched coordination bodies age into new silos beside the old ones. Whether this one escapes that fate turns on three disciplines.

First, honest counting: the number must stay master, and the camps and lectures its servants. Second, the Chief Minister’s continued hour: the design works only while the head of the table is its most demanding member. Third, reviews that correct course early and gently, in the room. The gazette has given me the ledger. These are tests I must pass before anyone else is asked to mark them.

The experiment deserves watching beyond one state and one subject. The problems that defeat us most reliably — learning, road deaths, dirty air — are all horizontal, and the machine we send against them is vertical. Someone had to try aligning the two.

The law student was not asking for a new committee. He was asking why the state could not find what a first-year could. The honest answer, for years, was that the whole of it was nobody’s job. Haryana has now written a different answer into its gazette: a name, an address, and a number to be counted in public.  / DAILY WORLD /

( O. P. Singh is a former Director General of Police of Haryana, India, and Chief Executive Officer of the SANKALP Society.)