Should India legalize/regulate lobbying?

Lobbying is not a new phenomenon in India nor is it restricted to a handful of businesses but if the Niira Radia tapes are to be believed lobbying in India has become so insidious that it’s no longer an attempt to simply influence policy, it may even work towards determining ministerial positions. In short, lobbying has become very serious business here and all business needs a set of rules. So, The Firm raises the question: Should India consider legalising lobbying?

CNBC-TV18’s Menaka Doshi debates this issue with Mark Rom, associate professor, Georgetown Public Policy Institute—professor Rom has done an extensive research on ethics and values in public policy and will give us great insight on lobbying in the USA which is the land of over 12000 registered lobbyists—along with CV Madhukar, founder and director of PRS Legislative, an independent research organization on legislative and policy issues; Anirban Mazumdar, assistant professor at National University of Juridical Sciences and MR Prasanna, independent lawyer and consultant.

Below is a verbatim transcript of the interview. Also watch the video.

Doshi: The question that lies at the core of this debate and that is that if we were to leaglise lobbying, will it help represent broader public interest in the course of more robust policy making or do you think by legalizing it all we will end up doing is give narrow commercially backed interest a disproportionate say in policy making?

Madhukar: The point is that if we take the word lobbying out of the discussion for now, we might actually get to the substance better because lobbying has become very tainted. So let me make two points. One is that in a democratic set up like India, we need people from across the spectrum to be able to get their views to policy makers who are going to affect their lives in different ways. So what we need to do is find good and efficient and transparent ways of doing that. The second is if there is money involved in this process of influencing what the policy maker does, that process should be made much more transparent than it is currently.

Doshi: Do you believe that the considerable experience that the US has with having regulated or legislated lobbying, it has helped create a fairer system of public policy that is more robust and that represents several interest groups as opposed to just a few of them?

Rom: Yes absolutely, lobbying will occur. People will try to influence the government, so the question is can we channel that lobbying into productive ways and we can do that by encouraging registration, by encouraging transparency, by encouraging disclosure. So that when interest groups contact elected officials or administrative bureaucrats, they make those meetings open in the public and known to the public so that voters themselves can be aware of the interest groups’ activities.

Doshi: Despite the long history that the US has with regulated lobbying or legalized lobbying, there has been severe criticism of the way lobbying has worked in the last several years. There has been tweaking in the regulations as well. Can you update us on some of the pros and cons of the system as it prevails today and what are some of the changes that you need to see?

Rom: The major emphasis on lobbying reforms in the recent years is to try to reduce conflicts of interest. So you want to reduce gift giving, you want to make it so that lobbyists do not provide anything of material  benefit to the people they are trying to lobby and if anything is given, then those things are disclosed so that people can judge whether the interest groups have tried to gain undue influence.

From the Obama administration perspective, one of their first acts in office was to have an executive order which prohibited the Obama Administration either from hiring lobbyists- those who had lobbied within two years of joining the administration or allowing people who had left the Obama administration to service lobbyists for two years. The idea is that you want to break the chains where there is undue influence of special interest groups upon the government.

It is minutely successful but there will always be people who are trying to influence the government outside of the registered lobbying framework.