Pages
Stay In Touch
More
© 2012 Sanjeev Sabhlok's revolutionary blog
We could, for convenience, visualize India as a large ship jointly owned by us, the citizens. Elected political representatives can then be likened to a captain hired to take this ship to a desired destination. Bureaucrats, the next layer of public managers, are its sailors. There is a wide range of Bureaucrats including public servants, defence forces, police and the judiciary. Our political representatives constitute our government and the Bureaucracy the machinery of the government. It is our political representatives’ task to design and use this machinery to deliver upon the agreed objectives for which we have hired them. Bureaucrats are directly accountable to our representatives and only indirectly to us.
This relationship between citizens, who are the sovereign principals in a free society, and their agents and sub-agents is depicted in the diagram below.
For a free society to have a good Bureaucracy is almost as important as having a good political leadership. But India’s bureaucracy falls well short of international best practice. Indeed, to say that our Bureaucracy is sloppy, sluggish, inefficient and therefore ineffective is perhaps an understatement. It won’t do us any good to get outstanding political leaders generated by the reforms outlined in the previous chapter and then force these leaders to use the shabby Indian bureaucracy to deliver results.
Having used the term Bureaucracy (do note the capital B, though) in an unusually broad sense so far, I’ll now revert the use of this word to its more common meaning, namely, as the public services. Within the Indian public services, I’ll focus almost entirely on public service leaders, primarily on the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). Pranab Bardhan, a well-known Indian economist, has rightly suggested that we should create a structural shift in the level of internal competition in the bureaucracy. ‘It is anomalous to expect [economic] reform to be carried out by an administrative setup that for many years has functioned as an inert, arbitrary, heavy-handed, often corrupt, uncoordinated, monolith. Economic reform is about competition and incentives, and a governmental machinery that does not itself allow them in its own internal organization is an unconvincing proponent or carrier of that message.’[i] To advance Bardhan’s perfect diagnosis, I will compare and contrast the Indian and Australian bureaucracies, having worked in them for a combined period of over 25 years.
The first thing to note is that the quality of personnel who hold leadership positions in Australia is significantly better than their Indian counterparts. This difference magnifies even further at the lower levels of the bureaucracy. Australian bureaucrats are significantly better in leadership skills and possess not only extensive specialist policy knowledge but also impeccable personal integrity. The Australian delivery of governance services is superior because its public service leaders are outstanding. By no means do I imply that public choice theory does not apply to Australia. Indeed, most civil servants here, as anywhere else, behave in a manner entirely consistent with such theory. But carefully designed incentives have ensured that their self-interest is aligned with the public interest. In particular, contractual appointments at the senior levels and absence of tenure ensures alignment with political representatives’ policy goals. Further, internal competition ensures that only the best public servants rise to the top.
In India, on the other hand, while we pay attention to the principles of competition and merit in assembling our cricket team, which is therefore internationally competitive and can even beat Australia on a good day, we do not apply such principles to our bureaucracy. This has led to the vast chasm that I have noted above in the performances of these two bureaucracies.
[Note:This is an extract from my book, Breaking Free of Nehru]
[i] In his 2003 oration – see Jha, Raghbendra, ed, The First Ten K R Narayanan Orations: Essays by Eminent Persons on the Rapidly Transforming Indian Economy, ANU E Press, The Australian National University, 2006. Available for downloading from [http://epress.anu.edu.au/narayanan_citation.htm].
I'm extracting below a section from BFN's Online Notes. Those who have read my book know that at the behest of the publisher I had to remove a significant chunk to make the book shorter. The remaining material, below, relating to the history of India's public administration, was excluded from the main book and is available online. It has not undergone the editorial scrutiny of the publishers and has more spelling errors than BFN does.
It is important, I believe, that we all make an attempt to understand the history of India's public administration. Doing so will show us how India's administration has failed to keep pace with changes and why has India now has one of the world's worst administrations.
SHORT HISTORY
The Indian system of public administration is thought to be one of the world’s oldest, barring perhaps the Chinese. In 322 BC “Chandragupta … established a complex bureaucracy to see to the operation of the state and a bureaucractic taxation system that financed public services”.[1] Among the more recent advances in public services in India, the model of land revenue collection designed by Sher Shah Suri in the 1540s is acknowledged as a major milestone in systematic governance. The Sher Shah model was then adopted by the Mughals and later by their successor—the East India Company.
The East India Company was one of the world’s oldest joint-stock companies; hence a pioneer. Like any good modern private company, it had built its own set of rules and procedures by 1757 to ensure that business policies laid down by its Board of Directors were complied with across its entire trading business. But after Clive’s political triumph of 1757 at Plassey, the Company was faced with the entirely new challenge of governing vast numbers of people and extensive areas of land, initially only in Bengal. It became a private company that ‘ruled’ people: a unique combination. It had to quickly come up with policies to deal with this completely new role. The bureaucracy it invented in response to this challenge was perhaps the first modern bureaucracy in the world. This bureaucracy was not accountable to the whims of kings, but to a private company’s Board of Directors; it developed as a private sector bureaucracy.
The Company started by creating a Covenanted Civil Service (CCS) whose members signed ‘good behaviour covenants’ with the Company’s Court of Directors. With a view to keeping wage costs low, members of this service were paid relatively modestly but they could ply their own commercial business on the side and thus make commissions on their trading activities. As would be expected, this model led to serious conflicts of interest. Given the lucrative opportunities created by the political patronage of their commercial activities, corruption began to flourish in British Bengal. That Robert Clive was impeached (unsuccessfully) on this ground says something about the enormous possibilities of corruption at the confluence of India’s feudal culture and a modern joint stock company which did not have checks and balances for its new role as a government.
The very concept of corruption being an impropriety was perhaps recognised for the fist time in India at this stage. Officers had been expected to use their office to coerce villagers into submission in all previous monarchical regimes. The British officers’ corruption was quite customary for India till then; no one thought it was improper. Chanakya had noted such natural tendencies among officers in his Arthashastra 2,400 years ago (“The Mahamatras are like fish. Does one know, when the fish is drinking water?”).
However, the expectation from public officers was changing. The change started in England where the Magna Carta of 1215 instilled some discipline in the king’s officers. The king of England agreed through this charter that ‘No Constable nor other Bailiff of ours shall take the corn or other goods of any one, without instantly paying money for them.’ This was revolutionary, as it created a new expectation that a public servant was only to live off his own salary.
Therefore the corruption in British Bengal was not commented upon adversely in India. It was in England that concerns were raised about it. The British Parliament took about a decade to make he Regulating Act of 1773. This Act created a Governor General for British India. A subsequent India Act,1784 laid the specific principles of governance of India by the Company. We cannot blame the British Parliament for taking so long to do something about corruption in India (it at least took some action: India’s Parliament, on the other hand, actively encourages corruption!). The British Parliament was relatively weak at that stage, and also unrepresentative. It was only in 1688 that it had gained the authority to continue to assemble without long interruptions imposed by British kings.
The second Governor General of British India, Lord Cornwallis (1786-93) seems to have laid the foundations of the modern Indian public services. He split the Company bureaucracy into two parts: the political branch responsible for civil governance, and the commercial branch responsible for its commercial activities. On entry, an officer of the East India Company had to opt for one of these branches. Commercial officers retained access to commissions on their trading activities. Those who opted for the political branch were compensated by Cornwallis through a significant hike in salary. With this, corruption came to a grinding halt in the higher echelons of British India’s government. Till independence, these higher echelons would distinguish themselves by remaining spotlessly clean. Indeed, this continued well into the early years of independent India even as our politicians were starting to become super-corrupt.
The political branch attracted talented British middle-class youth with scholarly tastes and policy interests. Wonderful writers emerged from amongst them who penned elegant and largely accurate accounts of the lives of ordinary Indian peoples. In some cases, these civil servants proved pivotal in the development of local Indian dialects and languages. They compiled dictionaries; even created scripts. The role of the District Collector, perhaps found only in India, also further evolved and became the hub of British administration. This office was particularly important given the poor means of communication available in those days, with the attendant need to empower local officials to make decisions on the ground without waiting for prior approval.
To streamline the processes of administration, Cornwallis created a civil service manual as part of the Charter Act, 1793. Carrying on Cornwallis’s foundational work, Lord Wellesley set up the Fort William College in Madras in 1800 to induct new entrants to the CCS. This college was moved to England in 1805 and became the Haileybury College. (A tidbit: among the teachers at Haileybury was the famous Thomas Malthus who was its first professor of Political Economy and taught British India’s civil servants from 1805 till his death in 1834. They were also taught the latest economic and political thought, including Adam Smith.) The Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration at Mussoorie continues the tradition established in 1800, imparting a two-year induction package to new recruits.
Given increasing concerns that appointments to the CCS by the board members of the Company were not made exclusively on merit, the Company threw the Indian civil service open to competition in 1853. This was a significant reform that even Britain would not implement in its own government for the next sixty years. In 1854, William Gladstone commissioned Northcote and Trevelyan to report on the future of the Civil Service in England. [Addendum: Those interested in history will note that Charles Edward Trevelyan married T.H. Macaulay's sister and later became Governor of Madras, apart from holding senior positions in England. His son wrote the life and works of Macaulay]. They studied the British East India Office as a model, and a few other government offices in England and recommended that civil servants in England should also be recruited through an open competitive examination, and that promotions should be made on merit, not on the basis of seniority. The frequently cited precepts of an apolitical permanent career service, being not only recruited without political patronage but whose members offer impartial advice to the political leadership, arose from this report. When Gladstone became Prime Minister in 1868 he implemented some of these recommendations. Competitive entry started in England only in 1914.
In the meantime, the British India civil service had kept up its lead in public service reform. The Indian Civil Service Act was made in 1861. Next, the recommendations of the Public Service Commission of 1886-1887 were implemented. Later, in the 1910s, in response to Indian nationalists, the British allowed Indians to take the entrance examination for which they had to travel to England. From 1922, India was made an examination centre. The number of Indians in the ICS began to steadily rise. At the time of independence, in addition to the generalist civil service, the ICS, which provided high level governance functions, India had evolved nine other central services which managed specialist areas.
The point of sketching this history in some detail was to highlight that by the mid-1800s, the Indian civil service was perhaps at the cutting edge of public administration in the world. Regrettably, India’s public services have stagnated since then while the rest of the world has continued to evolve and reform. The design of the IAS today is based almost entirely on the model of 1853. The most important public administration reforms in the world since then include the abolition of tenure in the top echelons of the public services, and bringing in significant political strategy alignment. Let’s explore these changes.
[1] John P. McKay, B.D. Hill anid J. Buckler (1988). A History of World Societies.Vol. 1. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. p.74
This is something I wrote in 2003 after working for around two years in WorkSafe Victoria. This was a time when I had started understanding the detailed causes of my extremely severe RSI (something which even the best of doctors don't understand, even today), which was, as a consequence, beginning to reduce from the peaks of its intensity. At that point I started thinking about India once again and wrote (mostly dictated on voice recognition software) a few things after a gap of three years. This little note on the inspector raj is one of them.
Note that at that stage I had not yet fully understood the public administration reforms that New Zealand and Australia had implemented, but had formed some initial understandings after having working inside the bureaucracy here. Some of these thoughts led to further analysis through extensive reading. The findings of my experience and studies I then reported in chapter 5 of BFN and an article in Times of India.
INSPECTOR RAJ – from a different end of the world: Issues involved and working in India and the West.
What are the dimensions of the differences between the Indian bureaucracy and the systems of work in the developed countries?
The first thing that seems to stand out is the open plan seating, with virtually every conversation being heard by a neighbour. Except for the extremely senior managers, all sit together, four around a simple partition, heads looking out at each other, and around them. This was a rather strange phenomena for the first few months. One would hear intimate details of different people's families or weekend plans, at the same time as you would hear about strategy being discussed; people would yell over the partitions to seek clarification, they would be sudden meetings called by manager herding his sheep by walking around and calling out people's names. Rather informal, efficient, likely to be free of corruption, and intense, in terms of getting to know people on the same floor and in the organisation. The other point is the coffee room, where people go to pour out coffee, get water, heat their breakfast or have lunch. The kitchen is cleaned by the officers and staff in rotation, with only the very senior managers exempt from the cleaning tasks.
All this is very functional: quite distinct from the dysfunctionality of the Indian bureaucratic organisations. Officers sit in different rooms, served by a paraphernalia of staff; while a few of the officers may meet in the meetings or over lunch, very little is known about each other unless you happen to be familiar in some other context.
I illustrate the difference in systems with the difference in quality between the inspectors under the Factories Act in India and the inspectors under the Occupational Health and Safety regulations in Australia is absolutely dramatic. This difference in quality leads to tremendously different outcomes on the ground.
The question arises – how does this difference in quality come about? One of the first things is that these inspectors have worked previously in the industry and are significantly paid in comparison to what a comparable person with similar experience and calibre in the private sector would be paid. An Indian inspector has no prior experience in industry and is extremely lowly paid individual.
The second difference is in terms of the management of inspectors. A vast body of professionals such as ergonomists, hygienists, statisticians and other professionals, many of them with industry experience, continuously research the state of knowledge and update expectations for the community. The process of upgrading these expectations is of course iterative, with the community being involved, all concerned stakeholders being consulted at each stage, issue papers and draft regulations being circulated for comment, and the Internet being widely used to ensure that all information on the subject in the entire world is made available during the evidence gathering process.
Inspectors are highly trained, not only in terms of their background which is usually a professional one, but in terms of the knowledge imparted to them by the professionals who manage the knowledge gathering process. This training is continuously updated so that improvements in technology are disseminated. Inspectors have access to all Australian standards, laws and regulations that are currently applicable in the state, and all forms etc., on their laptop computer. The laptop computer that is synchronised frequently, whereby the information that was updated in the interim period is available on the spot instantly at site.
All notices issued to the companies are issued on the computer and printed. Obviously, electronic copies update the system and are used for many purposes including quality assurance. This being a legislatively required activity, the records maintained on the network are accessible for use by any authorised person such as Project Officer (my role), or prosecutor.
Given the amount of information that is available to the management, supervision is also enormously better than in India. Quality assurance is an important aspect of supervision. Given the ready access to all kinds of data related to the visits including telephone numbers, names of officers who visited, time of visits, activities observed etc, it is extremely easy to determine whether a particular inspector has complied with the law or overstepped his bounds in any particular way. Each notice that is issued has an attached comment that shows the workplace how to appeal. Appeals are extremely rare due to the quality of the work of inspectors.
Another aspect that enhances the work of the inspectors is the availability of printed material as well as CDs, and copies on the Internet. On each visit the inspector goes prepared with appropriate printed reading material or CDs for that workplace. For instance, there could be some updation of state of knowledge on forklifts, which is then made available during the visits. Obviously the inspectors go in a fairly large vehicle which carries not only their equipment but also printed material and which can also carry material and documents that may be confiscated or collected under the law during the course of the inspection.
This does cost a lot of money, but as you can see, the quality of output is proportional to the quality of the input. Accordingly it can be safely said that the health and safety of the workers in Australia is looked after in the best possible way given the state of technology available today. This does not mean that there are no casualties or fatalities or injuries. Extensive records are kept of each and every incident which can be analysed in a multitude of ways. It is the duty of the employer to carry out such analysis and take suitable action, but the inspector can also call for such records and analyse them given the need or the time.
The facts do not lie. Despite slight improvements in perceptions about Indian corruption over the past 15 years, India is still ranked on par with China in terms of corruption by the extensive surveys conducted by Transparency International. These two SOCIALIST countries have thus managed to account for most of global poverty and corruption over the past 60 years. While poverty has slightly reduced now due to (relatively) more economic freedoms than these countries gave their citizens in the past, corruption has not budged. Both countries take the cake for misgovernance.
This is a shame, since examples of (relatively) good governance exist in Australia and New Zealand – particularly in the latter. Good governance is not rocket science. My writings about the reforms needed in public administration and political systems in India (see chapter 5 of BFN) are partly based on the experiences of Australia and New Zealand.
Table: India's Transparency International rankings 1995-2010
|
Year
|
India index
|
India rank
|
China
index
|
Australia
index
|
New Zealand index
|
|
1995
|
2.16
|
8.8
|
9.55
|
||
|
1996
|
2.43
|
8.6
|
9.43
|
||
|
1997
|
2.88
|
8.86
|
9.23
|
||
|
1998
|
3.5
|
8.7
|
9.4
|
||
|
1999
|
3.4
|
8.7
|
9.4
|
||
|
2000
|
3.1
|
8.3
|
9.4
|
||
|
2001
|
3.5
|
8.5
|
9.4
|
||
|
2002
|
3.5
|
8.7
|
9.3
|
||
|
2003
|
3.6
|
8.7
|
9.4
|
||
|
2004
|
3.6
|
8.7
|
9.3
|
||
|
2005
|
3.5
|
8.6
|
9.4
|
||
|
2006
|
3.3
|
8.7
|
9.6
|
||
|
2007
|
3.2
|
8.8
|
9.6
|
||
|
2008
|
3.4
|
8.8
|
9.5
|
||
|
2009
|
3.4
|
8.6
|
9.5
|
||
|
2010
|
3.5
|
8.5
|
9.4
|
In BFN I wrote: "No other well-established democracy generates super-corrupt, even criminal political leaders like ours does. While leaders in democratic free countries command respect, and sometimes even inspire the world, our political leaders inspire utter contempt. Prior to the inception of Transparency International (TI) in 1993, it was widely acknowledged that India was an extremely corrupt country, but there were few systematic comparisons. Since then, using international benchmarking, TI has consistently found India among the most corrupt countries in the world. Between 2001 and 2007 we occupied somewhere between the 70th and 90th position in the world in TI rankings. Even communist China, drug-infested Columbia and genocide-ridden Rwanda have at times been ranked less corrupt than us. Therefore, whatever else we may be today, we are definitely not the world’s role model on ethical behaviour. "
I also offered numerous ways in BFN to almost entirely eliminate corruption from India. One of these was:
"For every ten ranks that India rises on a sustained basis of two years in Transparency International rankings, there will be a 5 per cent one-off bonus (for politicians)."
I guess I need to tighten up the performance indicator, but there surely must be a good way out there to link TI rankings to political remuneration.
NOTE THAT NONE OF THE REFORMS I HAVE SUGGESTED CAN POSSIBLY BE IMPLEMENTED BY CORRUPT CONGRESS AND BJP.
You will have to join and/or otherwise support FTI in order for these reforms to be implemented.
Addendum: An excellent article in The Economist, 27 Nov. 2010.
Recent Comments