Lords of the files

India's bureaucratic addiction is an old pathology but despite decades of debate our
babus remain mired in a culture of lethargy, corruption, political influence and a
bloated yet inadequate workforce. The country needs its civil servants but it's time for
a new template.

Ajit Kumar Jha

ISSUE DATE: Oct 1, 2018 | UPDATED: Sep 22, 2018 08:47 IST

Illustrations by Siddhant Jumde

Aiming to inject vigour and vitality into the Leviathan that is India’s 164-
year-old bureaucracy, the Narendra Modi-led NDA government decided in
June 2018 to open the highest echelons of the Indian Administrative
Service (IAS), with over 5,000 officers, to outstanding domain experts from
the private sector and academia. Bypassing the constitutionally sanctioned
Union Public Service Commission examination, the central government
invited applications from candidates under the age of 40 and with 15 years
of experience for the post of joint secretary -- the cerebrum of the top
bureaucracy dealing with policymaking -- in the 10 key departments of
Revenue; Financial Services; Economic Affairs; Agriculture, Cooperation &
Farmers’ Welfare; Road Transport & Highways; Shipping; Environment,
Forests and Climate Change; New & Renewable Energy; Civil Aviation and
Commerce.

It would add just 10 more specialists to the existing 341 joint secretaries,
249 of them IAS officers, for a fixed tenure of three years, extendable by
two. It symbolised how daunting it is to reform the cumbersome
bureaucracy. In the past, several economists- among them, former prime
minister Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Raghuram Rajan,
Rakesh Mohan, Arvind Panagariya, Rajiv Kumar, Arvind Subramaniam-
have been brought in from the outside. An ardent admirer of lateral entry,
Panagariya says: "For the first time in its 70-year history, the system itself
is being opened to bring outside experts into bureaucracy on a competitive
basis."

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Yet the pilot experiment to inject domain specialists and infuse a corporate
style of functioning into the system elicited disdain and protests from across
the spectrum of babudom. Many derided lateral entry as unconstitutional
and contrary to the mission of 'public good'. Opposition leaders spied a
conspiracy behind the initiative, with Congress leader, former law minister
and chairman of the Second Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC)
Veerappa Moily alleging: "The BJP-led NDA government's move on lateral
recruitment is part of its roadmap to saffronise the civil service." Dalit
groups said the initiative violated the constitutional provisions under which
bureaucrats were selected in the past with adequate quota for reservations
of SC/ST and "other backward class" groups.

The word 'bureaucracy' derives from the French bureau, meaning desk,
and the Greek kratos, meaning rule. It acquired a pejorative association
from the outset, with the French economist Jacques Claude Marie Vincent
de Gournay who coined the term classifing it as an "illness", of
"bureaumania". The German sociologist Max Weber gave bureaucracy a
measure of respectability when he called it a rationalised system of
administration, run by trained professionals selected via a meritocratic
system.

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In India, the bureaucracy is a legacy of the British Westminster model of

administration. Why did independent India choose to retain a system born
of the hubris of the Raj? India's first home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, had
written to prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1948 advocating a civil
service, in the functioning of which "political considerations, either in its
recruitment or in its discipline and control, are reduced to the minimum, if
not eliminated altogether". Although several members of the Constituent
Assembly opposed continuing the civil service, and Nehru himself was
reluctant, Patel, in his speech to the assembly in October 1949, declared:
"The Union will go, you will not have a united India if you do not have a
good All India Service which has [the] independence to speak out its
mind ." The iron man prevailed and the IAS was born vide the All-India
Services Act, 1951.

Over the years, however, what British premier Lloyd George described in
1922 as "the steel frame" of the British Raj has become a "rusted frame"-
overly politicised, venal, relying on an outdated system of files and mired in
red tape and bureaucratic logjams that breed inefficiency and delays.

So widely known are the Indian bureaucracy's shortcomings that they have
inspired television serials such as Ji Mantriji, an adaptation of the BBC
series Yes, Minister that made light of political will meeting administrative
intransigence, and Office Office, a sitcom on the travails of the aam aadmi
who is stymied at every step by corrupt babus.

In the current structure, members of the All-India Services- the IAS, Indian
Police Service (IPS) and the Indian Forest Service (IFS)-are central
government employees assigned to various state government cadres and
supported by the provincial civil services. IAS officers may also be
deployed to various public sector undertakings. Central government
employees account for 3.1 million of the bureaucracy's total strength of 10
million. Laws enabling and protecting the civil services are enshrined in
Articles 308-323 of the Constitution and the Civil Services Rules. This was
done to keep the bureaucracy independent of the political arena. Yet, over
a time, it has been replaced by a political-bureaucratic nexus that is now
proving entirely ineffective in dealing with the multifarious problems
confronted by a country that is growing at a galloping rate but whose
bureaucracy continues to operate at a bullock-cart pace.
India has 51 ministries (compared to 21 in the UK and 15 executive departments in the US ), 55
departments and 83 commissions
Neta-Babu Nexus

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N.N. Vohra, former Jammu and Kashmir governor and author of the 1993
Vohra (committee) report on the criminal-politicianbureaucrat nexus in
India, wrote in his 2016 book Safeguarding India: Essays on Governance
and Security, "To remain in power at any cost, the political executive
consciously selects pliable officers." Politicisation, most bureaucrats say, is
ugliest at the top, in the selection of the two key posts in states: of the chief
secretary and the principal secretary to the chief minister. A chief secretary-
rank officer elaborates, "Pliable officers are selected for the two posts,
bypassing seniority. Anyone questioning the political masters is shunted
into the loop line, usually dumped into the Board of Revenue. The junior
civil servants get sucked into the system because the chief secretary
prepares their Annual Confidential Report or ACR in the states."

"It is nobody's case," adds a secretary-level officer, "that a CM blindly

follow seniority in appointing the chief secretary, or that, once appointed, a
CS be a fixture till he retires. But if any CM appoints three chief secretaries
in three months and resorts to massive seniority-skipping, then there has to
be meddling for political reasons, alienating honest bureaucrats."

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Retired IAS officer and former secretary, Planning Commission, Naresh

Chandra Saxena, calls such politicisation of key posts a 'mushrooming
growth' of 'committed bureaucracy'. "I would place their number as between
25 per cent and 50 per cent of the total, depending upon the state," he
writes in the Economic and Political Weekly.

Under the Constitution, state-level politicians cannot sack IAS officers

recruited by the central government. Retribution, therefore, for civil servants
and police officers who refuse to comply with the demands of their political
masters comes in the form of suspensions and frequent transfers. During
her eight-month stint as Madhya Pradesh chief minister in 2003-04, Uma
Bharati transferred 240 of the state's 296 IAS officers. Mayawati, as Uttar
Pradesh chief minister, transferred one particular officer over a dozen
times. "I used to keep my suitcase with a few clean clothes and a bag with
some important papers ready, unsure when and where I'd be transferred
next," he says. Each time you have a new CM, most bureaucrats are
transferred from one district to another, one ministry to another. UP CM
Yogi Adityanath transferred 138 IAS and IPS officers within a month of
taking charge in March 2017. Says Saxena, "In UP, the average tenure of
an IAS officer in the past 10 years is said to be as low as six months. In the
IPS, it is even lower, leading to the wisecrack that 'if we are posted for
weeks, all we can do is to collect our weekly bribe'."

"Across India, one comes across several instances of civil servants being
isolated, transferred frequently or subjected to more stringent punishment
simply because they profess to adhere to higher ethical standards," writes
former IAS officer and anti-corruption activist T.R. Raghunandan in his blog
'The Loneliness of the Ethical'. Ashok Khemka, the IAS officer who blew
the whistle on the Robert Vadra-DLF deal will testify to this; he is now on
his 51st posting. "When we entered it," says retired civil servant P.K.
Doraiswamy, "we were taught that IAS stood for Integrity, Anonymity and
Service. It is a sad reflection on today's chief ministers that, even after
seven decades of its existence, many of them still expect the IAS to be
nothing more than 'I Agree, Sir'."

Since state-level politicians can't sack officers of the central government, they use transfers as a
tool for retribution
The Venal Babu
As constitutional scholar Sir William Ivor Jennings warned in the 1950s,
"The intrusion of politics (in civil services) is the first step towards the
intrusion of corruption." Corruption within the bureaucracy has grown
apace, from the lower levels to the very top. In 1981, when he topped the
IAS and was allotted his home cadre of UP, Pradeep Shukla became an
icon for millions. But, by 2012, he had fallen from grace after the CBI
arrested him as the prime suspect in the Rs 5,500 crore National Rural
Health Mission (NRHM) scam that saw the sensational murders of two
chief medical officers and a clutch of questionable suicides. The contract
for the purchase of hundreds of mobile medical units was awarded to three
companies-Jagran Solutions, Jain Video on Wheels and Camp Rewa-to
whom, the CBI alleged, Shukla had given undue favours. Shukla was
reinstated in 2015 by the Akhilesh Yadav government.
In the Rs 900 crore fodder scam in Bihar, the focus might have been on
Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad Yadav and former Congress chief
minister Dr Jagannath Mishra, but six senior IAS officers too were
convicted and sentenced. They were former Jharkhand chief secretary
Sajal Chakravorty, former secretary of the animal husbandry department
(AHD) Mahesh Prasad, former AHD secretary Phool Chand Singh, former
finance commissioner, the late K. Arumugam, former AHD secretary Beck
Julius and the then Dumka commissioner, Sripati Narayan Dubey.

In Madhya Pradesh, graft-tainted IAS couple Arvind and Tinoo Joshi-IAS

officers of the 1979 batch-were suspended in February 2010 and dismissed
from service four years later, after an income tax raid unearthed
disproportionate assets worth Rs 350 crore and Rs 3 crore in cash. And
these cases from the Hindi heartland states are only representative of a
much larger malaise.

How have things come to such a pass? What ails the Indian bureaucracy?

More Tail Than Teeth

While some experts consider the bureaucracy "bloated" and therefore

advocate trimming flab, others argue that India, unlike the West, has an
acute shortage of government employees-be it civil servants in the top
echelons of the IAS to the lower levels like the Block Development Officers.

Of the 3.1 million central government employees, only a little over 5,000
are IAS officers. India has 257 central government employees for every
100,000 people, against the US federal government's 840. As on January
1, 2017, there was a shortage of 1,496 IAS officers against the sanctioned
strength of 6,500, Union minister of state for personnel (independent
charge) Dr Jitendra Singh recently revealed in a written reply to the Rajya
Sabha. This is because despite an incredibly competitive entrance
examination- in 2016, 180 candidates were selected from a pool of 465,882
applicants (a success rate of .038 per cent)-the government is finding it
hard to wean young talent away from the more attractive private sector
opportunities.

Successful candidates are also getting older (32 being the upperage limit
for merit-based exams, up from 26 in the 1980s), take an average of four
attempts (out of six) to pass the entrance exam. The rising average age
implies that many candidates spend most of their 20s and early 30s
preparing for and taking civil service exams.

The problem is worse at the lower levels. Only 10 per cent of the public
servants in India are in Group A and B, 60 per cent belong to Group C and
another 30 per cent to Group D, the two lowest-paid and least skilled
categories. Not surprisingly, India has a low bureaucracy to population
ratio: 1,622.8 government servants for every 100,000 residents. The US in
comparison has 7,681 for every 100,000 residents. As for policemen, India
has 123 per 100,000 persons, almost half the UN-recommended level of
220 and far below the levels in the US (352) and Germany (296).

In another research paper, authored by Aditya Dasgupta of the University

of California, Merced, and Devesh Kapur of the University of Pennsylvania,
a 2017 survey of 426 block development officers (BDOs) in 25 states,
covering roughly a rural population of 70 million, showed that, on an
average, there are just 24.5 full-time employees. Nearly 48 per cent of
sanctioned positions were reported vacant, a result of budget constraints,
political conflict around hiring decisions and red tape in the hiring process.

Shortages and lack of talent apart, Columbia University professor Sudipta

Kaviraj points to another anomaly in the Indian context: "There is a vast
gap between the language and culture of the two bureaucracies, one
westernised, the other vernacular." The training at the lower levels of
bureaucracy, if any, is abysmal.

All this leads to ineffective implementation of national development

programmes at the local level. "Local bureaucracies," says the Dasgupta-
Kapur paper, "are chronically under-resourced relative to their
responsibilities because politicians make these decisions (inefficiently).
BDOs are responsible for the implementation of dozens of different
schemes, from national 'flagship' programmes such as NREGA and
Swachh Bharat to state development programmes. Consequently, they are
either multi-tasking excessively or firefighting all the time, leaving no time
either for specialisation or rational thinking."

Little wonder then that according to a World Bank measure of government

effectiveness that captures the quality of a country's civil service, its
independence from political pressure and the quality of policy formulation
and implementation, India was in the 45th percentile globally in 2014,
nearly a 10 percentage point decline from 1996, when the data first began
to be collected.

A closer look at the indicators provides clues to where some of the

problems might lie. Except corruption, where India's rank has improved
from 124 in 2006 to 111 in 2016, its position on other indices has remained
unchanged or worsened in this period. It slipped one rank on government
effectiveness (90 from 89) and political stability (181 from 180), eight on
rule of law (100 from 92) and three on regulatory quality, and remained
where it was on accountability of public institutions.
"Once IAS stood for 'integrity, anonymity and service'; today, it is just 'I agree, sir'," rues an ex-
bureaucrat
Spearing the Corruption Monster

Following the Commonwealth Games and coal licensing scams, the

onslaught of a combined Opposition and the Anna Hazare-led anti-
corruption movement, it was decided to amend the Prevention of
Corruption Act, 1988, and make the provisions more stringent. The 1988
Act defined bribe-taking by a public servant as accepting any reward other
than salary for performing one's official act. The UPA government sought to
amend this in 2013 to cover actions by a public servant who accepts any
undue advantage other than legal remuneration, amasses disproportionate
assets and misappropriates property. The bribe giver too is charged with
abetment. When the bill failed to pass in Parliament, the Modi government
in 2015 expanded it to include abuse of position, use of illegal means and
disregard of public interest. It also mandated prior sanction from the Lokpal
or Lokayukta before investigating a public servant.

However, the proposed amendments led to resistance from the

bureaucrats. "Fear of prosecution by the audit, vigilance and CBI simply for
taking key decisions and performing one's job emerged as the main
bugbear," says one secretary. Prompted by the conviction and sentencing
of former coal secretary Harish Chandra Gupta and two serving IAS
officials by a court, the powerful IAS lobby demanded major changes in the
PCA.

It has taken four years for the civil servants' fears to be addressed. On July
26, the President accorded his assent to the Prevention of Corruption
(Amendment) Act, 2018. A new Section, 17 A, has been inserted, which
bars enquiry or investigation by an anti-corruption agency (including the
CBI and the Chief Vigilance Commissioner) against a public servant,
regardless of rank, in matters related to discharge of official duty, without
prior approval of the central or state governments. Additionally, Section 13
(1) (d) (iii), which defines 'criminal misconduct' as the acquisition of a
'valuable thing' or 'pecuniary advantage' in a dishonest manner, has been
deleted completely.

This has led to a ding-dong battle between the IAS and IPS lobbies. The
deleted clause, writes former CBI director R.K. Raghavan, was "the sole
effective weapon against a misbehaving senior official. This deletion
(without substitution with another clause) is disappointing because
corruption in high places is sophisticated and takes place in a highly
clandestine manner."

Former CBI special director M.L. Sharma agrees. In a recent newspaper

editorial, he wrote, "Prevention of Corruption (Amendment) Act, 2018,
might help some honest public servants, but more than a few offenders will
slip through the cracks. Divesting anti-corruption agencies such as the CBI
and state anti-corruption bureaus of initiative in combating corruption will
render them toothless." One additional secretary-rank officer sees it as a
"successful conspiracy hatched by the IAS cartel to rebuff the IPS,
reminding them of their subordinate status".

With corruption corroding the steel frame of the bureaucracy, what can be
done to stem the rot?
How to Fix the Bureaucratic Malaise

In 1901, historian David Gilmour in his book, The Ruling Caste: Imperial
Lives in the Victorian Raj, pointed out, that colonial India was administered
by a mere 1,000 civil servants when the population was 300 million. Today,
117 years later, there are only 5,000 IAS officers for 1.3 billion Indians.
While India has evolved from a rentseeking model of British imperial
territory to an independent democratic nation, the ratio of a DM to the
population has remained the same. Brown sahibs have only replaced the
white colonials and the institution of civil service remains as aloof, elitist,
egotistical, narrow and alien as it was when it was conceived by the British.
From recruitment to retirement, the IAS officers are as shielded from the
local population as they were from the "natives" in the colonial era.

So much so that Jawaharlal Nehru was at one point forced to say that the
Indian Civil Service is "neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service". When asked
in 1964 what he considered his greatest failure as India's prime minister, he
replied, "I could not change the administration, it is still a colonial
administration." It's a different matter that his daughter Indira ushered in the
"neta-babu raj", as Mark Tully put it. And despite the reforms of 1991,
successive prime ministers have largely failed to reform the obdurate
bureaucracy. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also made some moves in
that direction but they are far from enough.

The need of the hour is fundamental reform, whether it is depoliticising the

bureaucracy, cutting flab wherever it exists, strengthening state capacities,
or streamlining delivery mechanisms that have become sclerotic and
arduously slow. A number of reform commissions and committees-
including the most recent one, the Moily-led second ARC-have
recommended what needs to be done to refurbish the country's falling
administrative standards. These need to be implemented. Some of the key
reforms the central and state governments need to introduce are:

# Protect the bureaucracy from political interference.

This will help restore their neutrality and autonomy. Civil servants need to
be protected against political retribution. In the absence of a strong
convention, judicial intervention-such as by the Supreme Court in TSR
Subramaniam versus Union government-to protect civil servants from
frequent transfers and making it mandatory for politicians to give written
instead of oral orders can act as precedent.

The Modi government has made a few changes in this regard. According to
the 2016 rules framed by the Department of Personnel and Training
(DoPT), the nodal authority that deals with matters related to the IAS, the
PM and CMs have been made the final authorities to decide on the transfer
and posting of civil servants before the completion of their minimum
prescribed tenure. All states are required to have a civil services board or
committee on minimum tenure to decide on transfers and postings; they
are mandated to record the reasons for transferring a civil servant before
the completion of his fixed two-year tenure in a posting. The civil services
board may obtain the information from the administrative department of the
state concerned while considering such a transfer.

Though the SC judgment and DoPT rules are binding, violations are
frequent, according to civil servants, and most states have stalled such
moves. "Bureaucrats, in the ultimate analysis, are as good as the chief
executive of the state or the country; a better CM or PM will inspire a better
team of civil servants, a weak leader weakens his own bureaucrats," says a
chief secretary-level officer.

# Ensure bureaucrats serve the public, not politicians.

In continuation of the colonial legacy, babus regard themselves as "brown

sahibs", an exclusive club, the chosen few. The social distance and the
prevailing hierarchy between the civil servant and the public must be
reduced. "During the colonial era, the bureaucracy was mainly a rent-
seeking institution, today the main purpose of civil service is development,
fighting poverty and transformation of the country," says rural development
secretary Amarjeet Sinha.

# Reduce upper age limit from 32 to 26 to bring back idealism and youthful
vigour among entrants to the prestigious service. A similar merit-based
recruitment system and rigorous training must be introduced at the lower
levels of bureaucracy. Some bureaucrats suggest a replication of the
UPSC and state-level public service exams and training for all lower levels
of bureaucracy.

# Allot cadre after Common Foundation Course.

The Moily-led ARC report suggested cadre allotment after the foundation
course (FC). Towards this end, the Modi government is considering that
officers selected into the various civil services be allocated different states
on the basis of their ranking after completing the FC at the Lal Bahadur
Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA) at Mussoorie and
not on the basis of their ranking in the UPSC exam. This is being done to
ensure that new recruits take their training at LBSNAA seriously. However,
the Moily report had suggested that the responsibility of such evaluation
should lie with the UPSC, which should give 10-20 per cent weightage to
performance in the FC.

The Moily report had suggested three other reforms. The first was setting
up an Indian Institute of Governance (IIG), admission to which could be
through an entrance exam after Class XII. Individuals recruited through IIG
would go through three or five years of training for general or specialised
services parallel to the UPSC exam. The second reform recommended was
offering a golden handshake after 15 years of service and compulsory
retirement every five years thereon, based on the evaluation of an
independent body. The third was to allow movement to non-governmental
employment after 12 years of service with a maximum of three years' lien.

# Make the appraisal system more professional.

As a first step, the Modi government has recently launched a 360-degree
empanelment process inspired by corporate practices. Under this, an
anonymous committee of retired bureaucrats assesses an officer's
efficiency and efficacy on the basis of feedback from seniors and
subordinates, colleagues and external stakeholders. The bureaucrats are
also assessed on moral grounds through a comprehensive background
check of their integrity and reputation.

To put the entire appraisal system online and accessible for review by the
concerned ministries, the government has started a Smart Performance
Appraisal Report Recording Online Window or Sparrow. The DoPT has
recently extended Sparrow from the IAS to other cadres. Another DoPT
portal, System for Online Vigilance Enquiry or Solve, helps assess board-
level appointees.

The PMO has earned praise from several quarters for recognising merit
over seniority for top positions. But critics like former home secretary
Wajahat Habibullah say: "Nearly 35 per cent IAS officers due for
empanelment as secretaries have been passed over, with little
transparency in the process." The system is criticised for undermining the
traditional ACRs written by seniors for shortlisting and empanelment.
Former cabinet secretary K.M. Chandrasekhar says: "There is a discernible
lack of transparency in the 360-degree appraisal since the officer
concerned does not know who is conducting the appraisal. The
opaqueness of the system is not in conformity with modern management
practices."

# Permit lateral entry.

The Modi government's pilot project to induct direct recruits from the private
sector must be extended. Agriculture secretary Ashok Dalwai feels that
reform must disrupt and change the hierarchical culture of the bureaucracy.
"Colleagues from outside the bureaucracy who we work with are highly
qualified and competent. In the past, IAS officers acted as if they were
superior to outsiders. Today, we must compete and collaborate with
outside colleagues. Such an attitudinal change can transform the
bureaucracy and India."

# Trim the flab.

This can be done by identifying areas of excess bureaucracy and working

towards reducing them. To tackle shortages at the level of lower
bureaucracy, work can be outsourced to universities and research
institutions.

# Digitise, digitise, digitise.

Digitise all that can be digitised-land records, plan submissions, licence

approvals and issuance-ensuring transparency and efficiency. The
outdated filing system has to end.