New Delhi: Dubbing as a "maze" the working of Government whose functionaries were domesticated and drained of ideas, Disinvestment Minister Arun Shourie today (Mar 13, 2004) suggested reinventing governance in India by hacking away needless functions.

"The Ministries and departments are silos with multiplication of Ministries, every question is referred to half a dozen silos every reform is lost in the maze, core competence of officials or many Ministers is that they know the turns of the maze," Shourie said.

Addressing the delegates at the 'India Today' conclave on the topic "Governance: From Red Tape to Red Carpet", he said the present system had not only drained the capacity of officials to think, but had made them domesticated.

Shourie decried that everyone was so used to the present system that each effort to speed up things was questioned and looked at with suspicion with motives freely attributed both in Parliament and by journalists.

This apart, the fixation on things like Government must have 51 per cent stake in a company for control, was out of tune, Shourie said, while citing examples of corporate giants like Reliance, which controlled companies with just 26 per cent stake by taking measures "within the law to ensure control".

"This simple solution will not come to the Government, we are stuck on 51 per cent," he said while giving a number of examples to emphasise the point that multiple layers of governance without a reason were not only slowing down the economic growth but also hurting the reputation of the nation.