Changing the mindset of the Indian babu
In January 2001, a couple of friends and I attended the Mahakumbh Mela in Allahabad. It was in fact the Mahakumbh of Mahakumbhs—apparently, the stars align in this manner only once every 144 years. I happened to be there on the day of the holiest bath of the festival. It was an astounding spectacle, and I will never be able to forget the line of millions of people as they walked from the city and through the entirely new town that had been created on the banks of the Ganga for the occasion, in search of succour and salvation. Days later, I calculated that if all the people who had attended the Kumbh that night stood in single file, separated from one another by one foot, the queue would have stretched from the Prayag to Miami (assuming there were no seas in between).
However, the most amazing aspect of what we witnessed was the perfect organisation of the entire event that had stretched for more than a month. Everything was done utterly efficiently, from security to lost-and-found services to managing the swelling crowds to the cleanliness of the thousands of temporary toilets that had been built. Obviously, the Indian bureaucratic system worked superbly when served with a massive challenge, and when the stakes were almost immeasurably high (Last year, Uttar Pradesh CM Akhilesh Yadav was invited to Harvard Business School to present a case study on managing the Kumbh).
Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants a paradigm shift in how government works in India, and he has chosen the bureaucracy as his weapon. He ran Gujarat for 13 years through a tight group of loyal and competent officials who reported directly to the chief minister, often bypassing the relevant minister. He wants to do the same at a central level, and the question is: Can he?
For Modi is not only trying to create a wholly new way of how India is run, but also doing it at a time when the bureaucracy is perhaps at its most demoralised and risk-averse. The last five years have seen an astonishing drift in government, a debilitating lethargy in governance and a host of scams that convinced bureaucrats that the only correct decision was to take no decision at all. Files accumulated dust, stasis set in. The process had begun a long time ago—the slow degeneration of babudom—but over the last five years, the system seemed to have become ossified.
As far back as 1964, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had once called the civil services “the steel frame of India”, confessed to friends that what he considered his greatest failure was his inability to “change the administration, it is still a colonial administration”. He then went on to elaborate his belief that the continuation of that colonial administration “was one of the main causes of India’s inability to solve the problem of poverty” (quoted in the introduction to the Second Administrative Reforms Commission report of 2008 by chairman Veerappa Moily). In March 1966, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi said in Parliament: “What India needed today, was a revolution in the administrative system without which no enduring change could be brought about in any field”.
An incredible 600 committees and commissions have looked into different aspects of public administration in the country since Independence, but nothing much has changed. Moily goes on to write: “The common experience… is that (bureaucrats) resist changes as they are wedded to their privileges and prospects and thereby, have become ends in themselves… It will not be an exaggeration to say that the civil service in India… believes that its authority and legitimacy is derived not from the mandate of the people but from an immutable corpus of rules that it has prescribed for itself, without any correspondence to the needs and aspirations of the people it serves and the democratic ethos. That is why the functioning of the civil service is characterised by a great deal of negativity, lack of responsiveness to what the people want and the dictates of democracy.”
The need to have 12 signatories to a file has been reduced to four. There is a two-week time limit to every decision process. Everyone through whose hands a file passes has to make a comment and cannot pass it upwards with a “Pls advice”. All files have to be kept under lock and key.
Correction: This article has been updated. Sandipan attended the Mahakumbh Mela in 2001 and not 2011 as stated earlier.
(This story appears in the 22 August, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)