Stains on steel frame

India’s administrative ‘steel frame’ has long decayed into a decrepit, rusty cage that, far from holding up and furthering the national enterprise, has become one of its greater impediments. A sightless political leadership has steadily undermined the integrity and independence of virtually all institutions of governance in the country, and then appointed many commissions to look into the causes of cumulative decline, corruption and ineptitude. The reports of these commissions are duly submitted (usually after several extensions of tenure) and then gather dust in some forgotten archive.

Fresh in politics, nearly two decades ago, Rajiv Gandhi had excoriated the collapse of governance across the country, speaking of the "brokers of power and influence" who had converted "a mass movement into a feudal oligarchy". He had also disclosed that just 15 paise of every rupee of the Government’s developmental expenditure actually reached its intended beneficiaries. He had promised a radical overhaul of the system, but he evidently and dramatically lost the battle to eradicate the ‘brokers’. And since then, no one has even tried.

These ‘brokers’ have orchestrated the collapse of the Constitutional system of checks and balances, creating enormous bottlenecks in a structure of increasingly centralized administration which exacts ‘rent’ for the privilege of access and illegal gratification for every routine action that should, in fact, fall within the sphere of automatic compliance. Centralization and the concentration of power in the State and national Capitals has entrenched the darbar system, making officers and politicians rush constantly to these places – or permanently camp there if possible – and undermining their performance in their own places of work, as well as their accountability to local authorities and the people. The net result has been the progressive dismantling of the cadre base of all parties, and the steady erosion of the quality of district administration in much of the country.

Successive ‘solutions’ have often compounded the problem. Efforts to eliminate corruption in the ‘lower ranks’ have concentrated growing powers at the highest levels, and those who are meant to define policy are increasingly involved in the implementation and execution of day-to-day tasks of administration. The sheer number of decisions that require statutory endorsement of the Chief Minister in many of the States, or ministerial approval at the Centre, would astound any student of public administration. Needless to say, this centralization of power enriches small coteries, and the astronomical sums that are spoken of – albeit in sometimes hushed voices – as the personal fortunes of members of families of various current or former Ministers and Chief Ministers reveal the real impact, and perhaps intent, of the various ‘reforms’ the impose statutory requirements of ‘scrutiny’ at the ‘highest level’.

Another of our ‘great achievements’ is our proclivity for new legislation. Wherever there is a problem, a new law is brought into force, and new institutions and bureaucracies are created to implement and enforce each such legislative extension. The sheer weight of laws that lie dead on our statute books is already overwhelming – we are still to clear the debris of a great deal of antiquated and obsolete colonial legislation, and the paraphernalia of implementation that goes with it. And even as evidence of our utter and comprehensive failure to implement and enforce the most basic laws mounts steadily, the numbers of laws and their supporting bureaucracies as well as their supporting armies of clerical and other staff, continue to swell.

The entire process of Governance has, in fact, become an enormous drain on productive national resources. Union and State Budgets, over the years, have become a mockery of financial management. No budget is ever adhered to, and even where such apparent adherence is secured, a closer scrutiny exposes enormous waste and irregularities. The reallocation or the arbitrary and contrived release of funds towards the end of the financial year is routine in almost all Government departments, and leads to gross inefficiency and a tremendous waste of public funds. This happens year after year after year and, despite repeated and devastating censure by the Comptroller and Auditor General, nobody has been able to stop it – if at all anyone has honestly tried to do so.

A great deal of hope was invested in the ‘opening up’ of the economy, and the automatic ‘transparency’ that this development would impose on Government structures. Government interference has certainly been curtailed in a limited number of extremely narrow spheres, and divestment and the entry of the private sector – particularly in communications – has yielded some other and significant benefits. Unfortunately, the fact remains that little of this relief has accrued to the common man who must still approach the bureaucrat and the Minister as a humble petitioner through a maze of procedures that remain closely guarded secrets, revealed selectively and piecemeal, to those who can suitably ‘oil the machine’ or secure privileged access on other grounds. The slow crawl towards the globalised liberal economy has, consequently, brought a few minuscule areas into the circle of prosperity and, while these are very much in the eyes of the media and are projected as the great achievements of one Government or another, their impact on the larger population is, at best, dubious. This, precisely, is why the ‘feel good factor’ and the rise in share prices failed to return the National Democratic Alliance to victory in the last general elections, and the present disarray among the constituent parties of this political formation is evidence to the fact that they are still trying to reconcile themselves to the realities of their defeat.

It is abundantly clear that the system is failing, and that India could have moved forward much faster if we had a simpler administration and administrative guidelines, minimizing procedures and making them utterly transparent and comprehensible to the people at large. In the few cases where this has been tried, the simplification and streamlining of processes, and often the dismantling of structures of Governmental monitoring and supervision, once achieved, has never resulted in the oft-predicted doomsday scenarios of dissolution and anarchy. The converse is, in fact, the case: it is the complications of the system, the terrible intricacy of our laws and procedures, and the Kafkaesque structure of overlapping departmental jurisdictions, which creates and sustains power brokers, fixers and wheeler-dealers. It is these elements, with their political and bureaucratic collaborators, who are the only ones with an unshakable interest in the preservation of this inefficient, corrupt and nationally disastrous system.

There have been many noble declarations of intent on administrative reforms by successive regimes, and the present Government has also promised to ‘revamp’ the administrative system. The growing disorders around us, and the shrinking of areas of efficient governance, certainly in the rural hinterland, but also in critical areas of metropolitan and national management, must convince us that it is now a survival imperative to bring to an end, the bureaucratic and political fraud that has undermined the nation and that is jeopardizing our future. Tinkering with the system at its peripheries – as is currently being attempted by the move to replace the Annual Confidential Report (ACR) system with a Performance Appraisal Report system – cannot even scratch the surface of the entrenched vested interests that have undermined governmental functioning in the country. The national leadership will have to find the political will, the courage and the administrative competence to sweep wide and to sweep clean; or it will, in turn, be swept away by the rising tide of popular disillusionment and discontent – as past regimes have been.

(Published in The Pioneer, May 14, 2005)