Making a difference

An appointment to the civil service of the Company,’’ noted the Macaulay Committee Report in 1854 giving India its first modern bureaucracy which recommended that the patronage-based system of East India Company be scrapped in favour of tough competitive examinations, “will not be a matter of favour but a matter of right. He who obtains  such an appointment will owe it solely to his own abilities and industry. It is undoubtedly desirable that the civil servants of the Company should have received the best, the most finished education that the native country affords.’’

In retrospect, these were words that looked out well into the future, even though the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) is by no means the British Indian Civil Service (ICS), neither is 2011 akin to the 19th  and 20th centuries. The pulls and pressures of a modern, vibrant, ever expanding and often corrupt India have taken a toll on the working of the bureaucracy. An increasing number of idealistic officials have been silenced into  insignificant posting or worse.

Indian civil servants who ran state and central administrations in the immediate aftermath of Independence, remember them as times where a political boss could take ‘no’ for an answer from officers not willing  to oblige outside the prescribed limits of law.

Politicians of the period, most of whom had made their bones during the freedom movement, realised the strain it would place on governance if an official was summarily kicked out — or even implicated in  motivated cases —  simply because he had declined to comply with illegal orders from the top.

These men of eminence are merely mirroring what the Constituent Assembly of India had in mind when it said that the “bureaucracy  should be able to speak out freely, without fear of persecution or financial insecurity as an essential element in unifying the nation.’’

Given the political shenanigans of the   day, this situation seems idyllic. There is little doubt that many of the billion dollar scams that the country and the government of the day finds engulfed in, would not have taken place if the officialdom had been more resolute and upright. The civil service continues to dominate policy as it did  earlier and is well within its rights to refuse signing on the dotted line if he or she deems fit.

That is happening increasingly less. It makes sense to understand the anomalies that have crept into the system. Now political bosses are  averse to being turned down, no matter how outrageous or venal their request. 

They take serious offence at refusal, are prone to turn vindictive and use their ultimate power to toss and turn around the bureaucracy and break its back. There is little point in blaming officials if this is happening across states; sooner or later a lot of people will crawl when asked to bend. Sadly for the country, that seems like a malaise that has come to stay.

The current issue of Governance Watch deals with this critically changing asymmetry. We profile and interview some young civil servants who after spending a few years in service, remain undeterred by power  and pelf, disregard for personal safety, possess no overarching ambitions and are willing to work with their heads down, minus the light and sound. In this, the country should consider itself fortunate. Our interviews  conducted on a pan-Indian basis reveals this timber and that can only be considered good news.

So you have a north Indian IAS officer  serving in insurgency-ridden north east India with guts and conviction, another civil servant is   single-handedly tackling the mining mafia in Karnataka, a lobby of such clout that it routinely makes and unmakes chief ministers and counts as a factor in elections. 

There is the officer in Punjab who set in place a PDS system in an impoverished district on his own steam while a policeman in Uttar  Pradesh is hell bent on cleaning a virtually uncleanable system. 

On the way, innumerable punishment postings, personal threats, disturbed family lives and an insecure, less lucrative future stares them in the face. But no sweat. 

They continue to carry on in the face of odds, diehards who  are willing to implement government policies by the book and not afraid of taking on the high and mighty of the land. It is their seminal contributions that this issue seeks to record.