Hyderabad: Union Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya said it was former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee who introduced the concept of 'Good Governance' in India as he had the vision to see that India could not become a developed nation without it.

“The decision to confer the Bharat Ratna on Vajpayee ji is a long overdue. He has spent his life in the service of the nation and is an outstanding personality. The nation will always be proud of him,” Dattatreya said while addressing a meeting to mark the 'Good Governance Day' here on Thursday.

The Union Minister further added that Vajpayee’s style of building consensus and taking bold decisions were exemplified in the initiatives for peace with Pakistan and his bus journey to Lahore, the decision to have an independent nuclear policy, the first Prime Minister to be able to serve a full-term based on a coalition of parties, initiate economic reforms that resulted in over eight per cent growth in the GDP and the manner in which he resolved the disputes in the Telecom sector, by virtue of which almost every Indian now has access to mobile phones.  “When the people of the country wanted change, they chose a model for good governance in the form of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for the work he had done in Gujarat. The earlier scam-free stint of the NDA at the Centre also played a role in the decision of the Indian people who gave a majority on its own. There are many characteristics that the two Prime Ministers from the party share, like considering themselves as Pradhan Sevaks instead of Pradhan Mantris, taking bold decisions and placing the interests of the country over family and partisan interests,” he said.

He said Modi had demonstrated this bold and decisive nature many a times in the last six months, the most recent being Wednesday’s ordinances relating to the coal and insurance sector. The bungling and inaction of the last 10 years in these two sectors of the economy were well known. Even though the opposition did not facilitate legislations in these two important sectors, the Assembly election results in Jharkhand and Jammu & Kashmir have hopefully sent a clear message that the people were still with the BJP and NDA, and that they were looking forward to an era of good governance, he said.

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