As civil service reforms
go, the Niti Aayog’s Three Year Action Agenda: 2017-18 to 2019-2020, released
recently, contains little that is new or innovative. The idea that policy
making is a specialized activity and needs lateral entrant of specialists on fixed-term
contracts to bring in competition into established career bureaucracy has been
talked about for years and is a tautology today. The same goes for making the
goals and progress available publicly to incentivize delivery and measure
performance objectively, with high performance rewarded and poor performance
reprimanded. Likewise, E-governance is no new beer, as is outsourcing of
services; they’re old wine in new bottles.
The only innovation, if
one can call it so, seems the plea for longer tenure of Secretaries. It creates
two important inefficiencies. One, with a time horizon shorter than two years,
the officer is hesitant to take any major initiatives. Two, and more importantly,
to the extent that any misstep may become the cause for charges of favouritism
or corruption post retirement, the officer hesitates to take decisions on any
major project. This causes an inordinate amount of delay in decision-making.
The inefficiencies are two-fold: (a) hesitation to take any major initiative;
and (b) fear of misstep to take decisions on any major project.
It’s bemusing how these
two inefficiencies can be overcome with longer tenures. For one, empirically,
officers with tenures of more than 2 and going up to 3/4 years haven’t fared
any better than the ones with shorter tenures. Lack of foresight and initiative
aside, to be fair, they have been moved around to more than 2-3
departments/ministries, thereby not granting them the time needed to settle
down and make salutary contributions. But it’s not fair to blame the system
entirely for there are departments/ministries that are low/high in the
mandarin’s perception/weight indices and with the long window available to
them, there is the human urge for upward pecking mobility. Lobbying, jostling,
networking (see the work-hours wasted here!), nepotism, and favouring the
powers-that-be through subtle sleight of hand are rife. One has with growing
frustration seen how people with no little knowledge/experience, but with the
right “connect” and “networking”, go up and up the proverbial totem pole only
because the new post figures high in the perception-cum-weighty index and is a
better springboard for post-retirement sinecures. This is the nub.
Like statistics, the
Niti Aayog’s eggheads conceal more than what they reveal; its platitudinous
recipe is less relevant than what it shrouds: post-retirement sinecures. The
heart of the problem is that no bureaucrat (apart from one-odd outliers) ever
wants to retire. In a feudal mindset, retirement sucks: identity-loss after a
lifetime of humongous ego-trips and condescension, vanishing into the woodwork
is the hardest ask; retirement is sudden cold-blooded cremation. Hence exists
the the intense urge to stay on somehow. It is also the reason why senior
officers close to R-Days take calculated and “desperate” gambles to “oblige”
political masters at the cost of their much vaunted “professional ethics”. In
effect, the two “inefficiencies” stay. One wishes the Niti Aayog had provided
answer to this endemic nettlesome syndrome that defeats every sanguine public
motivation.
One wonders how
practical and efficacious Niti Aayog’s suggestion for specialization and
induction of lateral recruits for a fixed tenure is. No questions are asked on
the need for specialists and domain experts in public policy, but the issue is:
Given the bureaucratic construct, will this behemoth of bureaucracy easily
admit and acknowledge the role and contribution of the newbie, especially when
their own unimaginative low-performance and lassitude hitherto unquestioned
will (inevitably) be shown in poor light in comparison. Though a fixed tenure
might help shielding the laterals from being junked midway, will frustration
not creep into their day-to-day efficiency, thereby nullifying the
cross-pollination and cross-fertilization of their ideas? Will they be accorded
their due for the contribution made to improve public policy and the same acted
upon without bureaucratic machinations and legerdemain? Or will the ear of
political masters earned by mandarins negate any such noble impulses making it
a zero-sum game?
Rather than shooting the
breeze, I wish the Niti Aayog had drawn an earthy roadmap. A host of issues
glibly prescribed will amount to nothing if they are not implementable. To be
fair, E-office, long overdue, is the way to go; when I was holding additional
charge as Additional Secretary & Financial Advisor of the Ministry of Civil
Aviation more than 2 years ago, it had gained currency. It was liberating to
retrieve data in a jiffy; it granted flexibility. I could work in my parent
Ministry of Environment and Forests in Indira Paryavaran Bhavan rather than
getting the files over or going over to the civil aviation ministry located in
the Rajiv Gandhi Bhavan. Not to forget that electronic transactions don’t lie
on such (seemingly) small matters as date/time of disposal. The embedded system
and escalation facilities can show stark delays, apart from alerting the higher
ups of such delays. E-governance needs implementation within a tight timeframe.
The larger issue is of
efficiency: will e-office for all its good, engage the citizen through the
electronic medium and make governance effective? Only early last year several
directions of finance ministry to upload fairly innocuous information in the
website went unheeded lest it attract public ire.
Public policy issues are
roiled – apart from the much-maligned and putative red-tape-worm – in time-worn
vested interest, personal advancement, colonial baggage and mindset.
Holistically, the answer is in tightening governance’s value system. Financial
malfeasance is bad, but worse is intellectual dishonesty, subtly crafted under
the guise of amnesic mnemonics, poor data analysis and obfuscating interstitial
interpretation kept under wraps in grimy official records. Financial misgivings
no matter how convoluted they are, still palpate; intellectual dishonesty
covertly hemorrhages.
For a feudal society
with a bespoke traditional mindset of grand reparative gestures to espouse and
promote the biradiri cause and where the state is seen as omnipotent and where few
realize power is but abuse of power, it is imperative to have an arm’s-length
system.
But is that enough?
Maybe not. There could be a need to actualize implication of Robert Klitgaard’s
formula on dishonesty: Corruption = Monopoly + Discretion – Accountability
(C=M+D-A). Even that too may not be enough. Proactive disclosure provided under
Section 4 of the RTI Act 2005 will need to be sculpted into the e-governance
platform. In this our Indian Gilded Age, the atmosphere is agog with ideas and
impulses despite the consistent stonewalling of the established order. Citizen
rants against diminishing public value are getting louder by the day.
True, in today’s battle
of dialectics opacity wins, but then for how long? Over time and amid battling
dialectics, society’s voice will inexorably tilt in transparency’s favour. The
USA too went through the Gilded Age and the trauma of the robber barons. They
came out of it triumphant through laws crafted in the teeth of opposition. For
us the battle may be long and hard too but it’s time we had better see the
future. I wish the Niti Aayog had the vision to sense a Eureka moment here and
suggested measures to move in that direction.
(Reproduced from Outlookindia.com)
