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ABOVE ALL ELSE, GOOD GOVERNANCE IS THE CRYING NEED OF THE DAY and POOR GOVERNANCE IS THE REALITY NOW - K. Ramasubba Reddy
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India’s long experience in providing public services is extremely unsatisfactory. We have too many government schools where teachers don’t show up (or don’t bother to teach), too many primary health clinics with absent nurses and paramedics and too many police posts which citizens fear to approach. As Rajiv Gandhi pointed out long ago, corruption and leakages plague most public programmes and services, including those aimed at alleviating poverty. What’s more, most of the available evidence suggests that matters have worsened since his observations, as public services have become increasingly politicised and standards of probity have fallen steadily. |
Recently, a Hong Kong based consulting firm undertook a survey of the efficiency of civil servants in 12 Asian economies. Singapore came first and India last, trailing Indonesia and Philippines. Too much of our bureaucracy is not only inefficient and corrupt, but it is all-pervasive in its influence; even most of the supposedly independent regulators are manned by retired bureaucrats. Another characteristic of our bureaucracy is its complete lack of accountability for anything it does or does not do. |
Five years back, on coming to power, Prime Minister had made a commitment to giving priority to administrative reform and improved governance. But nothing worthwhile was achieved on the issue. Will there be any better results now? The public sector will never get the autonomy it badly needs because the netas and babus will not give up the powers of control over the units, both for personal benefit and for patronage. “And, so long as the bureaucratic stranglehold remains, it will breed complacent, not “learning”, organisational cultures. Apart from fiscal resources going to the public sector and starving more vital social services and welfare schemes, it is high time we recognise that the government’s managerial/administrative capabilities are nowhere near performing the minimum functions a state needs to with a modicum of efficiency.” BS-160609 |
| Reflections : |
‘The real problem with the Indian state is its social location in three different ways. Access to state power is seen as an instrument of social mobility and that legitimises all kinds of uses of state power. Second, in a deeply hierarchical society, the attraction of state power is precisely that it gives you power over others; it is the intrinsic delight of the exercise of power that animates individuals more than any idea of reciprocity. Too much importance is given to the IAS, very little importance is given to inculcating a sense of professional identity to lower level officials. As the classic study on American anti-corruption measures The Pursuit of Absolute Integrity pointed out, a sense of professional identity is far more productive of integrity and efficiency than rules or incentives. Reforming the state will require nothing less than a social revolution. There is a reason why there is little pressure on the state to reform. Frankly, big business in India can get away with almost anything. It has the resources to manipulate the system and can absorb the costs of government rules. It is small business that really suffers. But the result is that big business has never been a serious lobby for genuine bureaucratic reform. It is a lobby for special exemptions for itself and will never put collective pressure on government to reform. Finally, there must be ideological clarity in the state. The bureaucracy confuses ends with means, rules with outcomes, control with efficiency because we do not often ask the question: what is the state for? The more tasks that are indiscriminately given to the state, the more distorted its priorities and functioning. If the question of objectives is confused, the level at which decisions are taken is even more confusing. We are still amongst the most centralised states in the world. If we are serious about bureaucratic reform we need to ask questions about the character of our state and society; merely having more commissions will not do’. FE050609 |
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