Conducive atmosphere for doing business is wide ranging demand

In a sense this isn’t surprising as interpreting policy is a complicated process, as there is plenty of enthusiasm for what the law says, or what existing regulations provide for, and they are meant to be observed. In that case shaking bureaucracies to taking steps to improve sector atmosphere is exhausting.

Quite often a clear decision has to be made on a particular issue, for instance the decision to allow girls who become pregnant to continue with schooling in the same place or by any other arrangement but in formal schooling may have come from the very top. That announcement was given by the responsible minister – and it is in the same direction of making it easy not just for teachers but also for learners to survive a midlife error (the life of schooling that is) without it erasing all their hopes. A breadth of the public has continued to be critical on that decision; a good majority looks into the benevolence it shows.

At least two cases of policy interpretation or regulatory initiative put out in the past week stand out as illustrations of how this course of adaptation to a conducive business atmosphere is complicated. For one thing, a ‘conducive‘ atmosphere has to do with a transaction between a customer and service provider rather than seeking the say-so of a regulatory official, irrespective of the feelings of a regulatory body or individual holder of office in that regard. That clashes with certain other values, which traditionally speaking boils down to what we know as patriotism, that it isn’t in the public interest to do this or that.

The public interest was usually taken to be synonymous with regulatory prerogatives, that a certain statutory body is empowered to set conditions for doing business in one area or another. When a top official says that all pupils or secondary school students must return home during holidays and no classes be conducted, why shouldn’t that be left between parents and the schools? There are general rules that the ministry sets out, but prohibiting paying for auxiliary learning during holidays is a disruptive initiative.

Another is the prohibition of spraying insecticide in butcheries, on worries that it will harm people. We often spray insecticide before sleeping, and breathe such air, and it isn’t poison; just a little inconvenient, perhaps. Meat that is touched upon by an insect repellent will be cut up and washed before being cooked or roasted, and worrying about repellents at that stage is tantamount to mentally creating the problem just in order to act on it. And with 300,000/- to 1m/- fines floated, one can imagine the breadth of inaction bribes likely - and it is hard to actually separate this implication from the intention itself.