Ahead of the cabinet reshuffle, the rural development minister CP Joshi erred in judgment and erred big time, thus clearing the path of his own exit from the coveted, flush-with-funds ministry. He should have known that he was not just ignoring the advice of the National Advisory Council (NAC) but that of the Congress supremo Sonia Gandhi.

Just ahead of the reshuffle, the NAC, led by Gandhi, had advised the rural development ministry to link the NREGA wages to the minimum wages Act. To his peril, Joshi, while agreeing to link the wages to inflation, refused to link it to the minimum wages Act.

While the immediate trigger for his ouster from the ministry may have been Joshi’s disregard of the NAC advice, the ministry insiders say, his lackluster record in implementing the employment guarantee scheme, NREGA, Gandhi's pet project, had already put him on the watch list. His one and a half year stint as rural development and panchayati raj minister was high on promises and low on performance. The New Delhi media was never short of soundbites from the media savvy minister. His announcement of a number of ambitious policy decisions — appointment of ombudsmen who would be NREGA watchdog, Kaun Banega Crorepati for rural India, biometric projects for attendance of NREGA workers — got him columns of space and flashbulbs in the print media.

However, the implementation of a number of rural development schemes remained patchy. His signal achievement in the implementation of NREGA, say insiders, was, affixing Mahatama Gandhi's name to the scheme. Despite its potential to change the rural employment scene across the country, however, the scheme never moved out his own laboratory in Bhilwara, Rajasthan. Moving around the interiors of the state, I have seen how the Act was being smothered by a nexus of village and district officials. Those who demand work don’t get it and those who are responsible to grant (sarpanchs) work are roaming around in Boleros.

His successor, the former Maharashtra chief minister Vilashrao Deshmukh, has not been known as a performer either. He will do well to learn from his predecessor's experience.