WHAT AILS THE BABU?
A bloated and corrupt administrative culture borrowed from the Raj era is choking the Indian administration. How can this malaise be fixed?
India’s bureaucratic addiction is an old pathology but decades of debate our babus remain mired in a culture of lethargy, corruption, political influence and a bloated yet inadequate workforce. The country needs its civil servants but it’s time for a new template
aAiming to inject vigour and vitality into the Leviathan that is India’s 164-year-old bureaucracy, the Narendra Modi-led NDA government decided in June 2018 to open the highest echelons of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), with over 5,000 officers, to outstanding domain experts from the private sector and academia. Bypassing the constitutionally sanctioned Union Public Service Commission examination, the central government invited applications from candidates under the age of 40 and with 15 years of experience for the post of joint secretary—the cerebrum of the top bureaucracy dealing with policymaking—in the 10 key departments of Revenue; Financial Services; Economic Affairs; Agriculture, Cooperation & Farmers’ Welfare; Road Transport & Highways; Shipping; Environment, Forests and Climate Change; New & Renewable Energy; Civil Aviation and Commerce.
It would add just 10 more specialists to the existing 341 joint secretaries, 249 of them IAS officers, for a fixed tenure of three years, extendable by two. It symbolised how daunting it is to reform the cumbersome bureaucracy. In the past, several economists—among them, former prime minister Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Raghuram Rajan, Rakesh Mohan, Arvind Panagariya, Rajiv Kumar, Arvind Subramaniam—have been brought in from the outside. An ardent admirer of lateral entry, Panagariya says: “For the first time in its 70-year history, the system itself is being opened to bring outside experts into bureaucracy on a competitive basis.”
Yet the pilot experiment to inject domain specialists and infuse a corporate style of functioning into the system elicited disdain and protests from across the spectrum of babudom. Many derided lateral entry as unconstitutional and contrary to the mission of ‘public good’. Opposition leaders spied a conspiracy behind the initiative, with Congress leader, former law minister and chairman of the Second Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC) Veerappa Moily alleging: “The BJP-led NDA government’s move on lateral recruitment is part of its roadmap to saffronise the civil service.” Dalit groups said the initiative violated the constitutional provisions under which bureaucrats were selected in the past with adequate quota for reservations of SC/ST and “other backward class” groups.
The word ‘bureaucracy’ derives from the French bureau, meaning desk, and the Greek kratos, meaning rule. It acquired a pejorative association from the outset, with the French economist Jacques Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay who coined the term classifing it as an “illness”, of “bureaumania”. The German sociologist Max Weber gave bureaucracy a measure of respectability when he called it a rationalised system of administration, run by trained professionals selected via a meritocratic system.
In India, the bureaucracy is a legacy of the British Westminster model of administration. Why did independent India choose to retain a system born of the hubris of the Raj? India’s first home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, had written to prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1948 advocating a civil service, in the functioning of which “political considerations, either in its recruitment or in its discipline and control, are reduced to the minimum, if not eliminated altogether”. Although several members of the Constituent Assembly opposed continuing the civil service, and Nehru himself was reluctant, Patel, in his speech to the assembly in October 1949, declared: “The Union will go, you will not have a united India if you do not have a good All India Service which has [the] independence to speak out its mind… .” The iron man prevailed and the IAS was born vide the All-India Services Act, 1951.
Over the years, however, what British premier Lloyd George described in 1922 as “the steel frame” of the British Raj has become a “rusted frame”—overly politi-
cised, venal, relying on an outdated system of files and mired in red tape and bureaucratic logjams that breed inefficiency and delays.
So widely known are the Indian bureaucracy’s shortcomings that they have inspired television serials such as Ji Mantriji, an adaptation of the BBC series Yes, Minister that made light of political will meeting administrative intransigence, and Office Office, a sitcom on the travails of the aam aadmi who is stymied at every step by corrupt babus.
In the current structure, members of the All-India Services— the IAS, Indian Police Service (IPS) and the Indian Forest Service (IFS)—are central government employees assigned to various state government cadres and supported by the provincial civil services. IAS officers may also be deployed to various public sector undertakings. Central government employees account for 3.1 million of the bureaucracy’s total strength of 10 million. Laws enabling and protecting the civil services are enshrined in Articles 308-323 of the Constitution and the Civil Services Rules. This was done to keep the bureaucracy independent of the political arena. Yet, over a time, it has been replaced by a political-bureaucratic nexus that is now proving entirely ineffective in dealing with the multifarious problems confronted by a country that is growing at a galloping rate but whose bureaucracy continues to operate at a bullock-cart pace.
India has 51 ministries (compared to 21 in the UK and 15 executive departments in the US ), 55 departments and 83 commissions
Neta-Babu Nexus
N.N. Vohra, former Jammu and Kashmir governor and author of the 1993 Vohra (committee) report on the criminal-politicianbureaucrat nexus in India, wrote in his 2016 book Safeguarding India: Essays on Governance and Security, “To remain in power at any cost, the political executive consciously selects pliable officers.” Politicisation, most bureaucrats say, is ugliest at the top, in the selection of the two key posts in states: of the chief secretary and the principal secretary to the chief minister.
A chief secretary-rank officer elaborates, “Pliable officers are selected for the two posts, bypassing seniority. Anyone questioning the political masters is shunted into the loop line, usually dumped into the Board of Revenue. The junior civil servants get sucked into the system because the chief secretary prepares their Annual Confidential Report or ACR in the states.”
“It is nobody’s case,” adds a secretary-level officer, “that a CM blindly follow seniority in appointing the chief secretary, or that, once appointed, a CS be a fixture till he retires. But if any CM appoints three chief secretaries in three months and resorts to massive seniority-skipping, then there has to be meddling for political reasons, alienating honest bureaucrats.”
Retired IAS officer and former secretary, Planning Commission, Naresh Chandra Saxena, calls such politicisation of key posts a ‘mushrooming growth’ of ‘committed bureaucracy’. “I would place their number as between 25 per cent and 50 per cent of the total, depending upon the state,” he writes in the Economic and Political Weekly.
Under the Constitution, state-level politicians cannot sack IAS officers recruited by the central government. Retribution, therefore, for civil servants and police officers who refuse to comply with the demands of their political masters comes in the form of suspensions and frequent transfers. During her eightmonth stint as Madhya Pradesh chief minister in 2003-04, Uma Bharati transferred 240 of the state’s 296 IAS officers. Mayawati, as Uttar Pradesh chief minister, transferred one particular officer over a dozen times. “I used to keep my suitcase with a few clean clothes and a bag with some important papers ready, unsure when and where I’d be transferred next,” he says. Each time you have a new CM, most bureaucrats are transferred from one district to another, one ministry to another. UP CM Yogi Adityanath transferred 138 IAS and IPS officers within a month of taking charge in March 2017. Says Saxena, “In UP, the average tenure of an IAS officer in the past 10 years is said to be as low as
Since state-level politicians can’t sack officers of the central government, they use transfers as a tool for retribution
six months. In the IPS, it is even lower, leading to the wisecrack that ‘if we are posted for weeks, all we can do is to collect our weekly bribe’.”
“Across India, one comes across several instances of civil servants being isolated, transferred frequently or subjected to more stringent punishment simply because they profess to adhere to higher ethical standards,” writes former IAS officer and anti-corruption activist T.R. Raghunandan in his blog ‘The Loneliness of the Ethical’. Ashok Khemka, the IAS officer who blew the whistle on the Robert Vadra-DLF deal will testify to this; he is now on his 51st posting. “When we entered it,” says retired civil servant P.K. Doraiswamy, “we were taught that IAS stood for Integrity, Anonymity and Service. It is a sad reflection on today’s chief ministers that, even after seven decades of its existence, many of them still expect the IAS to be nothing more than ‘I Agree, Sir’.”
The Venal Babu
As constitutional scholar Sir William Ivor Jennings warned in the 1950s, “The intrusion of politics (in civil services) is the first step towards the intrusion of corruption.” Corruption within the bureaucracy has grown apace, from the lower levels to the very top. In 1981, when he topped the IAS and was allotted his home cadre of UP, Pradeep Shukla became an icon for millions. But, by 2012, he had fallen from grace after the CBI arrested him as the prime suspect in the Rs 5,500 crore National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) scam that saw the sensational murders of two chief medical officers and a clutch of questionable suicides. The contract for the purchase of hundreds of mobile medical units was awarded to three companies—Jagran Solutions, Jain Video on Wheels and Camp Rewa—to whom, the CBI alleged, Shukla had given undue favours. Shukla was reinstated in 2015 by the Akhilesh Yadav government.
In the Rs 900 crore fodder scam in Bihar, the focus might have been on Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad Yadav and former Congress chief minister Dr Jagannath Mishra, but six senior IAS officers too were convicted and sen-
tenced. They were former Jharkhand chief secretary Sajal Chakravorty, former secretary of the animal husbandry department (AHD) Mahesh Prasad, former AHD secretary Phool Chand Singh, former finance commissioner, the late K. Arumugam, former AHD secretary Beck Julius and the then Dumka commissioner, Sripati Narayan Dubey.
In Madhya Pradesh, graft-tainted IAS couple Arvind and Tinoo Joshi—IAS officers of the 1979 batch—were suspended in February 2010 and dismissed from service four years later, after an income tax raid unearthed disproportionate assets worth Rs 350 crore and Rs 3 crore in cash. And these cases from the Hindi heartland states are only representative of a much larger malaise.
How have things come to such a pass? What ails the Indian bureaucracy?
The New Flabocracy
Size, for one. To give but just one example, the Union minister for steel is assisted by a secretary to the Government of India, an additional secretary and financial advisor to the Government of India, four joint secretaries, a chief controller of accounts also looking after the accounting matters of the ministry, one economic advisor of the rank of joint secretary, six directors, two deputy secretaries, 12 under-secretaries, one deputy director, other officers and supporting staff and a Technical Wing under the charge of an industrial advisor to the Government of India.
Not just that, at 51, India has the highest number of ministries in the world. A typical developed country has 20 ministries, China has 21, the US 15 executive departments (equivalent to ministries), and Britain 21. Besides the ministries, we also have 53 departments, two independent departments and 83 commissions. Since most of the controls on steel and coal had been withdrawn long ago, do we really need ministries for these sectors today?
Moreover, a visit to any one of India’s 51 ministries reveals another peculiar obsession of the Indian bureaucracy: its penchant for paper. In a bureaucratic system created and perfected by the Raj for oversight, control and internal transparency, the paper trail is meticulously laid out in brown files tied with laces. Notes, marked in red, blue, black pens go up the hierarchical chain, from the undersecretary to the deputy secretary, up to the director, the joint secretary, the additional secretary, to the secretary. This builds up unnecessary paper work, and inordinate delays in decision-making, which in turn has bred the culture of greasing the bureaucratic wheel (see The Journey of a File...).