Of the many images of the Prime Minister’s trip to Washington last week, the one that intrigued and interested me most was of him meeting Elon Musk and family. As I watched him smiling happily and handing out gifts to Musk’s children, I found myself hoping that he found a moment to ask Musk a few questions about how DOGE was cutting government spending. For those who may not know what the acronym means, it stands for Department of Government Efficiency. One of the first things Donald Trump did after becoming President for the second time was to put his friend in charge of this vital new department. Musk has been performing his job so ruthlessly that hundreds of government employees have lost their jobs overnight and government programmes like USAID have been closed altogether.

Narendra Modi has promised more than once that he wants ‘minimum government and maximum governance’, but he seems unaware of how to do this. Consequently, the Government of India remains the lethargic, wasteful behemoth that it always was. When I did a little research, I discovered that we taxpayers pay salaries to 48.47 lakh employees and pensions to 67.95 lakh retirees. I remember having a conversation with a Chief Minister once who told me that by the time salaries had been paid, there was virtually no money left to do anything else.

Walk into any government office anywhere in India and you will notice that there seem to be more than 10 people doing a job that can easily be done by one person. Modi is not to blame for this. It is a leftover from secular, socialist times when the Government of India was the biggest employer in the country because the private sector had been crushed beneath the weight of quotas, licenses and corrupt regulators. When I was a starry-eyed Modi Bhakt in the first two years of Modi’s first term, I kept waiting for the moment when he would start minimising government. Not only did this never happen, but he also seemed not to have observed that there were ministries that could be closed without anyone noticing.

One relic from ancient times is the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which was set up to control information and broadcasting, and not help it along. In that olden time, when I was a junior reporter, this was easy. The only broadcaster was dear, dreary Doordarshan and its sister, All India Radio, which, during the Emergency, we took to calling All Indira Radio. But today, information seeps through the cracks even when there are strict Internet shutdowns. India leads the democratic world in this department. And a network of very efficient spies has been created to trawl social media in search of Indians saying bad things about the Modi government. Is this minimum government Prime Minister?

There are other things I had hoped would happen in my starry-eyed bhakti days. I had hoped that Modi would discover sooner rather than later that there were ministries that could become a single ministry. Do we need a Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, and a separate Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying? This is only one example. There are at least a hundred others. And the only reason why they exist is because a government job continues to be the ultimate Indian dream. The private sector would be able to create millions of new jobs if officials and regulators were more sincere about making it easier to do business in India.

Now for my favourite recipe for getting the government to stop wasting our money on itself. We must stop paying for ministers, bureaucrats, MPs and MLAs to live like princes at our expense. In no other democratic country will you find that the most expensive real estate is occupied by these so-called servants of the people. A government house in Lutyens’ Delhi is such a symbol of pomp and privilege that there are politicians of my acquaintance who ensure that their children inherit their house along with their constituency. If the Prime Minister sincerely wants younger and better people to enter politics, he could begin by making commercial use of Lutyens’ Delhi.

This alone would give the Government of India enough money to make Delhi look more like the capital of India than the sprawling urban mess that it has become. There would even be some money left to finally clean the Yamuna and rid us of those mountains of garbage that fester and spew poison into the already polluted air that we are forced to breathe. If DOGE begins to happen in Delhi, there is every chance that Chief Ministers, at least those ideologically affiliated to Modi, would be forced to make their own DOGE.

One final idea. Can we please abolish the post of the Collector? These unelected despots not only have the power to control all development in their districts, but they also live in grander style than we can afford. Why does this colonial post continue to exist 75 years after our colonial masters departed? If Modi wants to live up to the new slogan he invented in Washington, MIGA (make India great again), he could begin by setting up a series of discussions with his new best friend Elon Musk and get more details of how DOGE works. Few countries more desperately need a department of government efficiency than India. And MIGA would perhaps follow.