The PM’s speech in Parliament on 10 February has sent shockwaves through the bureaucracy. In a longish speech, the PM had questioned the capability of IAS officers to do justice to their jobs, and for added effect, the PM had disdainfully referred to IAS officers as ‘Babus.’ Significantly, as far back as 2016, the IAS Association had felt aggrieved by the increasing use of the word ‘Babu’ for IAS officers and had passed a resolution denigrating this practice.

Many interpretations have been given to the PM’s speech. Since the aforesaid speech was in connection with the promotion of private enterprise, it would appear that Mr Modi was praising private entrepreneurship in contradistinction to State run businesses. However, the IAS community took the PM’s remarks as an affront, a direct attack on their capabilities: in a newspaper article, a retired IAS officer advised Mr Modi not to judge the entire IAS cadre by the non-performance of a few officers close to him.

The bureaucracy definitely needs to introspect, because throughout his political career the PM had reposed immense trust in IAS officers, tasking them with the job of running their departments, with minimal supervision by ministers. Most of Mr Modi’s advisors and key functionaries are IAS officers, serving or retired, yet the quantum change promised by Mr Modi is yet to be seen.

In the almost seven years that Mr Modi has been at the helm, the changes have been, at best, incremental, and in some cases negative also, despite the carte blanche given to the bureaucracy. Thus, Mr Modi’s public dressing down of IAS officers could only have been prompted by a deep-rooted feeling of disillusionment. Indeed, good bureaucratic leadership is very important to further the Government’s agenda. Conversely, corruption and incompetence at the top can put paid to the efforts of the entire department.

The existence of bad eggs at the top levels of the Government is hard to comprehend because appointments to all posts above Joint Secretary level are made by the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC), a committee chaired by the Prime Minister and having the Home Minister as a member. More sensitive appointments have to be okayed by the Central Vigilance Commission; in some cases, approval of a committee having the Leader of Opposition as a member is necessary.

Probably, the lack of trust of the political leadership in the bureaucracy has led to a situation where top posts are manned solely by persons close to political leaders, who may not be best suited for the job at hand. Consequences of this flawed selection process are now manifest, doing immeasurable harm to the credibility of the Government and bureaucracy. Providing clean and effective administration is not easy, given the widespread corruption that permeates the bureaucratic monolith.

In a famous speech, Rajiv Gandhi had said that only 15 per cent of the Government’s funds were used productively while the rest were eaten away. Things have not really changed since then; Transparency International ranked India at 86 out of 180 countries in terms of honesty, with a score of 40 out of 100. The Government has tried to leverage technology to rein in corruption by eliminating discretion, but with little success. Rather, technological solutions have promoted centralisation which has hamstrung bureaucratic initiative at the operational level.

A rigid, centralised, ‘one size fits all’ approach, currently in favour, blunts the initiative of people at the operational level, leading to delays and worse. A decidedly better approach to curb corruption could be to streamline the procedures to book delinquent officers, getting rid of the convoluted rigmarole that makes action against bureaucrats virtually impossible. This is particularly true of lowerlevel functionaries, who in addition to service rules are protected by their unions, which come out with all guns blazing to shield their members.

An even bigger problem is the failure of senior officers to make their juniors perform that has forced the Government to outsource governance functions or to shift responsibility for lower-level functions to senior officers. Most Government schemes fail because they are not implemented on the ground by lowerlevel functionaries who treat Government employment as a sinecure.

Here also, the Government has tried to use technology, but with little success because employees who do not do Job A would not do Job B also. Additionally, the untried and untested Version 1 computer programmes operated by outsourced workers, often lead to incongruous results. The death of subsidised ration beneficiaries who could not purchase subsidised food grains because of Aadhaar mismatch highlights the ill effects of such badly implemented technological solutions.

In many cases, technology has compounded operational problems because most Government departments have failed to formulate SOPs for the new technology enabled environment. Governments come and go but the public, which deals with grass-root level officials, hardly perceives any change in governance. The much-reviled Emergency was the last occasion when the bureaucracy performed its assigned role e.g., of running trains on time and of being on time in office, leading to the conclusion that one needs to wield the stick to make bureaucrats fall in line.

Lack of accountability of bureaucrats is of such a high order that no action is taken even after the most egregious failures. Nonperformance of subordinates is quite often hidden by higher-ranking bureaucrats who gloss over failed schemes by preparing glowing reports for the Government. It is an open secret that even in notoriously corrupt departments, all Class I officers get perfect scores along with certificates of integrity in their Annual Performance Appraisal Reports.

It seems that no one ever thought of having a realistic performance appraisal system, for example, by grading a Department’s performance and distributing the Department’s marks amongst its officers. At the political level, the staple is to blame previous Governments for the present Government’s failures. Management practices at the top level in the Government of India are definitely archaic, a favourite one being laying down high numerical targets for various departments and/or initiating a competition between various units.

Many a times, the consequences of setting unrealistic targets causes mayhem. For example, unreachable revenue collection targets lead to “tax terrorism” i.e., tax officials making a nuisance of themselves and behaving like the proverbial bull in the china shop. Of course, it would have been much better if revenue targets had been fixed inconsultation with revenue collectors, keeping in mind the revenue potential for the year. The same story of fixing unachievable targets is repeated in most Government departments, which leads to fudging of figures at the year end.

Most bureaucrats are so obsessed with figures that they try to somehow achieve the numerical targets laid down by higherups with little attention to quality of their output. A better bureaucratic leadership would have done a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis of each unit reporting to them and would have advised all units in a way that the best possible result could be achieved for the organisation as a whole. Productivity in Government offices will increase dramatically if modern management practices replace the antediluvian procedures being followed presently.

The quality of governance has suffered inestimably because reporting has become more important for bureaucratic appraisals rather than actual performance. The District Collector who was supposed to tour his district for fifteen days in a month is mostly found in his office. Field-oriented positions like the Inspector in the Income-tax Department, have become desk jobs. Resultantly, almost all Government employees have become desk-bound file pushers, seldom bothering to work at the ground level.

The bureaucracy can perform better only after a thorough review and revamp of the public administrative system. All Governments have been found lacking on this score; the reports of the First and Second Administrative Reforms Commission (1966 and 2005) have been only partially implemented. Fearing job losses, optimisation and automation of work processes is perpetually on hold. Even routine measures like giving proper training to Government employees and formulating SOPs in light of recent technical advances and changed business practices are hardly attempted.

Only a Hercules like Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel can clean the Augean stables of Indian bureaucracy, which epitomises Jerry Pournelle’s Law of Bureaucracy: “In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.” The wait for Godot goes on.

(The writer is a retired Principal Chief Commissioner of Income-Tax)