Su-raj Not Possible Without Making Bureaucrats Accountable For Non-Performance

The past few weeks have seen distressing stories of the breakdown of public utility services in different states hit the headlines.

After reports from Odisha and Uttar Pradesh of people being denied ambulance and hearse services and being forced to walk carrying the body of deceased relatives, comes the news of a person from a tribal community in Madhya Pradesh being forced to cremate his wife’s body using garbage after the cremation ground turned him away because he couldn’t pay for firewood.

But even people with money are not ensured dignity in death. Two weeks before the Madhya Pradesh incident, the family of a deceased retired professor was stunned to find a crematorium in Gurgaon putting wood from broken furniture on his pyre. Rain-related havoc in Delhi made global headlines after visiting United States secretary of state, John Kerry, got stranded in traffic for several hours. This isn’t as distressing as the other stories but is inexcusable, nevertheless.

The response to all these events has been nonsensical, to say the least. The political party in power in the state has been slammed by other parties, while all non-BJP parties have ganged up to blame the central government. How farcical all this is, becomes evident from the finger-pointing that followed the rain-wrought snarl-ups in Bengaluru and Gurgaon on July 29. The BJP blasted the Congress government in Karnataka and the Congress said what about Gurgaon. The Congress blasted the BJP government in Haryana and the BJP said what about Bengaluru!

In Delhi, after two days of traffic jams, the BJP blamed the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) state government, AAP blamed the BJP (which is in power in the central government as well as the municipal corporations) and the Congress blamed both. The commentariat, of course, blamed all politicians and political parties for everything.

But let’s be fair and be clear about one thing. Chief ministers, even ministers, can’t be arranging ambulance and hearse services, firewood in crematoriums and clearing storm water drains so that roads are not flooded at one big downpour. Each of these jobs belongs to someone else, who is not doing his job. Chief ministers can only try and ensure that these people do their jobs. But, beyond a certain point, can they?

Even as everyone and his uncle fulminates against the politicians – they are the easy targets here – it is business as usual for the people actually responsible for all this mess – the senior bureaucrats, the mid-level babus and the Class IV staff. They don’t lose their jobs, they don’t pay any penalty, and, heck, they’ve all just got a hefty pay hike.

This is just wrong.

Administrative reforms cannot be just about files moving faster, roads being built quicker, ease of doing business and e-governance initiatives, which is what Modi and most chief ministers keep boasting about. These are no doubt important. But it also has to be about people not being turned away from crematoriums and government hospitals and not being forced out of ambulances, about not returning from ration shops empty-handed, about civic life not coming to a standstill during every monsoon. The rudeness which anyone who is not moneyed or moneyed but not throwing his weight around encounters has to end. Economy and efficiency have to be accompanied by empathy.

It is not as if the debate around administrative reforms has not grappled with this issue. An “Action Plan for Effective and Responsive Government” was adopted by the Centre and the states during the United Front government in the late nineties. Around ten years later, the title of the twelfth report of the Second Administrative Reforms Commission headed by M Veerappa Moily was “Citizen Centric Administration: The Heart of Governance”.

But little had changed in that decade. As part of the Action Plan, there was a lot of emphasis on drawing up citizens’ charters. Unfortunately, these citizens’ charters have proved to be little more than a formality, with no one holding individual departments up to the citizens’ charters they have drawn up. In fact, the Second ARC report quotes a study by the Centre for Media Studies, which points out that most departments don’t have effective grievance redressal systems, that often citizens are not even aware that such systems exist and departments make no effort to educate them. “Not surprisingly, the result is a sense of helplessness.”

Successive Pay Commissions have spoken about the need for performance-linked incentives, and there is much criticism that governments ignore these recommendations and only implement those relating to pay hikes. But the Pay Commission, given that its scope is confined to pay and allowances, does not deal with the issue of fixing accountability on individual bureaucrats – from the crème de la crème Central Services officers in the central government to the clerk in a municipality.

The hounding of genuine action against top bureaucrats in initiated scams grabs headlines, but what completely escapes attention is that no bureaucrat is held to account for, say, flooded roads, roads caving in, contaminated water because of broken sewage lines.

The Second ARC sums it all up:

Complaining to higher-ups has little effect. The matter could well get lobbed back to the same official about whom the complaint was made and the complainant harassed even more. It’s difficult to fight the “I’ll show you now” dadagiri of Indian babus.

There are some genuine handicaps. Local governments complain that they are often not able to provide services efficiently because they don’t have monetary or human resources. This is a valid grouse – the devolution of power to panchayats and urban local bodies have not been accompanied by a commensurate transfer of funds and personnel. But are the local bodies doing what they can with the limited money at their disposal?

In one case in Odisha, a man was thrown out of an ambulance because his daughter died on the way to the hospital. The driver can’t use the ‘saving petrol money’ argument – if the child was alive, the ambulance would have spent the same amount of petrol in going to the hospital. This is about callousness that comes from the confidence that no action will be taken.

A lot of jargon is thrown about in the debate over administrative reforms. New public management is one. Other models are cited – the Second ARC quoted the example of public service agreements in Britain, in which there are clear service level agreements and funds are given to local bodies depending on these being adhered to. But even this will not work without the fundamental principle of responsibility and accountability being fixed. If a bureaucrat knows nothing will happen if he is lax in monitoring the public service agreements, nothing will change.

So do politicians have no role at all in the breakdown of public services? They do. They are culpable to the extent that they block administrative reforms or selectively implement them, leaving out the harsh measures. They are complicit to the extent that they shield the inefficient and insensitive officials and staff. How many chief ministers would dare to sack striking government officials as Jayalalithaa did? They will only point to the fact that she lost the next elections as a result and remain silent. They are guilty of not empowering local bodies.

But they will have to realise that so long as they do not make the bureaucracy accountable, it is they who will pay the price – by inviting public wrath and running the risk of not getting re-elected. So it is in the interest of all politicians to increase bureaucratic accountability.

Of course, removing the traditional anonymity of the bureaucracy carries a huge risk. Once the politicians know that it will be easier than now to pass the buck to babus, they may become even more irresponsible. So adequate checks will need to be put in place.

But there is no getting away from the fact that it is now time to make the bureaucracy accountable as much for its non-actions as for corruption. Su-raj will just not be possible without this.