Patricia Mukhim
A retired IAS officer in Delhi who is quite a popular guy among his peers, juniors and the crème de la creme of the national media once asked in dismay why his class is being labelled “bureaucrats.” He wanted them to be called by the more respectable moniker of ‘career civil servants.’ The very word ‘servant’ here is misplaced. How can servants enjoy pay and perks that are phenomenally over the top, move around in well secured swanky vehicles, live in plush bungalows with a retinue of servants; travel the world on the pretext of gaining more knowledge but never demonstrating that knowledge where it matters and enjoy all the creature comforts when their ‘masters’ the citizens of this country continue to suffer from shabby services and many slip below poverty line. If we have a class system in this country then the bureaucracy are a super class of their own. They are the elite of the community they belong to. Once a person gets into the civil service he is made for life irrespective of whether or not he delivers the goods. And those goods actually include implementation of schemes which they are supposed to articulate after having measured the pulse of the people they are supposed to serve.
Imagine a service that pays itself every few years without any rationale. After the 6th Pay Commission which will be effective from January 2016, a babu of the rank of Secretary to the Government of India (all chief secretaries, additional chief secretaries, principal secretaries and DGP rank officers) would be getting close to Rs 3 lakh remuneration per month complete with perks et al. Of course the non-tribal officers would end up paying a substantial amount (approx Rs 80,000 a month) as taxes but that is still a lot of money. The question to ask is how can a class that is meant to serve the poor of this country pay themselves such a huge pay packet? Why should tax payers’ money be expended on this class? Its time for the people of this country to start asking hard questions.
On an average day an IAS officer spends time flitting from one meeting to the next and adding to the bulk of their paper files (e-governance is just a fancy word in Meghalaya). The lower rung officers and clerks while away their time playing solitaire or computer games, because, almost about 60% of them are underworked and are appointed for all the wrong reasons. Try visiting any Government office at 10 am. You will find only the sweepers and cleaners. At 11am, a few good souls saunter in. Many walk in at 11.30- 12.00 noon. And no apologies about that! It’s their birthright. The Government has to keep shelling out salaries without assessing their performance or work output because that is something the ‘babudom’ has learnt to push into a deep hole each time the point is made by respective administrative reforms commissions. While the IAS types are normally punctual the very fact that they are not able to discipline their subordinates is, to me, a major administrative flaw. They should be held answerable for not being able to monitor what their underlings are doing because that results in huge revenue leakage. The Government is actually paying people for not doing anything.
When Narendra Modi was running Gujarat he had kept the bureaucracy on their toes. That is why whatever happened in Gujarat then became a good governance model. But when he entered the Delhi Durbar that model of accountability could not be imported. The bureaucracy in this country is a well entrenched web of corruption, racism, casteism, expediency, lethargy, and delay tactics. Dismantling this deeply rooted evil is well nigh impossible unless someone at the helm of this country takes a conscious decision to do so. The people of this country were naïve enough to believe that Narendra Modi would bring about this transformation in the bureaucracy. He has not yet shown the inclination to do so although there has been a lot of juggling around of officers. Juggling people around without correcting the deeply flawed architecture of governance is unlikely to achieve anything substantial.
Just look at our own state of Meghalaya. Some months ago we saw some activity along the Shillong-Guwahati road from Ryndang Briew to Barapani. It looked like the road was going to be widened hence one side of it was being flattened out by bulldozers. But this activity suddenly stopped. When enquiries were made it was learnt that the portion of the road which was being bulldozed belonged to the MeECL and that the Corporation honchos had objected to it’s dismantling. The PWD stopped work after being ordered to do so. Now the peculiar situation here is that the Chairman MeECL is also the Chief Secretary of the State. He therefore could have sorted out this mess without any delay. Or the matter could have been resolved before the bulldozing began. But that did not happen! The controversy therefore led to unnecessary delay in the road widening project. The knotty problem was only sorted out when a top politician of the state intervened. This is just one example of how inter-departmental issues are so badly addressed. And we talk of convergence! Convergence how, when every top and middle level official is virtually the king of his department? Do these bureaucrats care if people continue to experience governance lapses and vacuums? No they don’t because they are not held accountable. They will abort any system that seeks to measure their work output because they are in a comfort zone.
Take the case of the Corporatisation of the infamous MeSEB which is now called the MeECL. Do we really believe that anything has changed in this monstrous organisation? Sorry nothing has changed except that as a Corporation the MeECL can access loans from financial institutions. Otherwise it functions like a Government department. There are far too many employees at the clerical level. If a private company were to take over the MeECL after due valuation, at least 75% of the staff including the non-performing, corrupt, lethargic, self serving engineers would have been sacked because they are the reason why the Corporation is so sick. And I am not saying this without evidence. There are localities in this city which are within the Greater Shillong ambit which have power outages at least eight to ten times a day. Whenever the Area Manager (s) is/are asked why this regular tripping happens the glib reply is that repair works are on and there is an emergency shutdown. The word ‘emergency’ here has lost its meaning. How can you have an emergency everyday? Since the Corporation is still headed by an IAS officer or successively by this class, the question to ask is whether the IAS as a class actually has the capability and the wherewithal to professionally manage a (supposedly) profit-making institution like the MeECL which is sinking deeper into bad debts every day. A study conducted by a group of MLAs have found that the entire Power Generation paraphernalia in this state is in a deep mess. A time will come when the State will have to let go and sell off this money guzzling, non-performing monolith to some private power developer. When that happens we will hear the employees cry hoarse that they do not want privatisation. And why would they? It serves them well to continue with the present arrangement where no one takes stock of what they actually do and what value they add to the Corporation. Or whether they are the leeches that are sucking it dry!
In fact there are several projects/programmes hanging fire in Meghalaya for want of an accountability mechanism. The CEO of this State might have to outsource most of the development work under a time bound, tight financial regulation process to see results. Left to the babus whose prime motive after entering the service is to serve themselves, Meghalaya will wilt and sink even further. The IAS officers will of course go for further studies, get themselves cushy postings in Delhi, get their children well settled in some good institution abroad before migrating there themselves. That is the goal of their lives! If this country is in a knotty mess today it’s the bureaucracy that’s to blame. Politicians have only a five year tenure and are scrutinized by the people every five years. Who do babus answer to?