It does not come as a surprise to hear a Union Minister at the Centre complain about the functioning of bureaucrats. Minister of State in the Health Ministry Dinesh Trivedi has openly attacked the bureaucracy in charge of running the health ministry describing them as “slack and unaccountable”. While the accusations have been rubbished by the officers, the larger problem within the bureaucracy does exist and one cannot brush it under the carpet. It is not necessary that all officers are either corrupt or incompetent. In fact, there are so many good officers out there. The bureaucracy is the backbone of the government and they are performing their duty in running this country. And we have a competent recruitment process in which the best minds are selected into the various all India services. However we must admit that the government system has its flaws and even competent and good officers can get clogged in so called bureaucratic jam of red tape, corruption, inefficiency and insensitivity. That India’s bureaucracy is one of the most stifling and difficult to deal with has now been revealed in survey after survey. Hong Kong-based Political & Economic Risk Consultancy had last year ranked India’s ‘suffocating’ bureaucracy as the least-efficient. The survey rightly observes that they are a power centre in their own right at both the national and state levels and are extremely resistant to reform that affects them or the way they go about their duties. This year also the Hong Kong-based group surveyed more than 1,300 business executives in 12 Asian countries and came to the conclusion that India had the worst levels of excessive red tape. The report further warns that the inertia generated by a stifling bureaucratic system will, in the medium term, prevent India matching the growth rates of China, its competing economic rival in Asia. This is cause for concern and calls for urgent reforms if at all India want to realize its potential as a global and economic power in the true sense.
While the Indian bureaucracy is ridiculed no end, it is also true that we cannot do without it simply because public welfare, development and other goods and services are dependent on the government system. The common man still sees the bureaucracy as the harbinger of socio-economic change. There is enough goodwill for our officers among the public. In a national survey conducted recently on “What Indian Public Say About Indian Administrative Bureaucratic System”, about 79% of respondents believe that IAS system has the ‘power to take decisions which directly affect people’. While this is very encouraging nevertheless an overwhelming 93.5% of those surveyed were of the opinion that in the IAS system, ‘the tendency is to serve their political masters more than the public’ which, perhaps, indicates that they are more politicians’ servants and less public servants. Our experience in Nagaland also tells that ‘political pressure’ is the major constraint of the Civil Service system. This is a flaw that requires the right dose of reform. Consequently the existing government system needs a complete revamp. Only then do we have a realistic chance of achieving our development objectives. Our bureaucracy needs to perform much better if we want to move up into the high growth path of development that is eluding us at the present.
