Babudom and Modi’s Blind-Spot

The lived realities of every day India is far from what the alarmist rhetoric filling western media may make you believe about the country. That, however, doesn’t rule out the fact that stock-taking of a different kind is far more relevant and worth pondering over. The Economist in its latest issue, for instance, has a lead editorial comment slamming Modi government for the tardy pace of economic reforms or rather the lack of it. It’s an assessment which the country’s policy wonks and even casual observers of the economy may relate to and mostly agree with. But, what has generally escaped the attention of analysts citing evidence and causes for the government’s underperformance on the reformist agenda is how the failure has been shaped by a more basic failure in reforming the public bureaucracy.

As an inherently conservative machinery of governance with a systemic tendency to resist sweeping changes and policy shifts, the unreformed civil services continue to be the regressive agent holding back the reformist agenda. When economists look at processes and numbers to lament over the stalled process of reforms in post-liberalisation phase, what they overlook is how the intransigent nature of Indian bureaucracy has been the prime culprit leading to the stalled process. When state presence is entrenched in various spheres of economic life and processes wrapped with the fetish of red-taped labyrinths in government offices, the first casualty is the urgency of rapid reforms.

For all his advocacy of leading India to the next phase of economic transformation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi hasn’t been able to extricate himself from the statist structures of governance. That explains why there hasn’t been any substantive point of departure in remodelling, far less in replacing, the governmental apparatus for governance in the 21^st century. An early indication of the inevitable disappointment that was in store could be seen in what The Economist had observed barely five months after Modi assumed office in 2014- his belief in bureaucracy to deliver reforms.

There is a sense of disillusionment creeping in when one recalls the early promise of governance reset that Modi carried to South Block. Even the usual turfs of left-of-centre voices in world media like The Guardian were impressed by tokenism, though much needed, of disciplinary measures of punctuality and cleanliness in central government offices. The Prime Minister’s misplaced trust in the bureaucratic machinery, with all the disappointments of failure to push reforms, has now morphed into fond hope. A case in point is how speaking at a Civil Services Day function in New Delhi two months back, the Prime Minister exhorted bureaucrats to work as facilitators and enablers of the economy, not as regulators. That’s a direction that reveals more about Modi’s commitment to reforms, and less about how he wants to fix the obdurate cogs which have developed stakes in the unmoving machinery.

That has meant that a holistic review of civil services as an institution with a critical look at its structure and utility have not been part of how the Modi government wants to recalibrate governance. The changes proposed and done have been more procedural rather than substantive. That’s not to say that Modi government hasn’t shown the political will to initiate reforms

A slew of measures like the drafting and introducing of bankruptcy code, abrogating of many archaic laws, easing of the norms for foreign direct investment in insurance, defence and railways, new regulatory structures including one for fixing railway tariff and the roll-out of the goods and services tax from July this year are clear statements of intent. Earlier, the dismantling of the Planning Commission accompanied by removing the distinction between plan and non-plan expenditure, scrapping a separate Railway Budget speech and rescheduling the budget period by almost four weeks, new steps for monitoring inflation targets and fiscal consolidation could be added to the list that is obviously longer than this. Irrespective of that, the government’s indifference to fix the institutional structures of governance isn’t helping the creation of a new ecosystem for reforms administration.

A small number of economists and commentators, like Mihir S Sharma, have written perceptively about this basic limitation plaguing any vision of reforms. Almost two years ago, Sharma correctly diagnosed, “We still have a tenured, generalist civil service, organised on Victorian public-school principles, even as our economy and governance become fiendishly more complex.” The remedy he suggested may sound radical but not off the mark. Advocating the scrapping of the Indian Administrative Services (IAS), Sharma wrote, “You have a government machinery that is unaccountable, under-informed, and all-powerful. It lacks creativity. If Prime Minister Narendra Modi fails to live up to the expectations that he has raised, it will be entirely his fault. He should have started by ending the IAS.”

Far from thinking about such fundamental changes, the Modi government has done too little to even reform the bureaucratic machinery.

First, the mechanisms for fixing accountability of civil servants continue to be weak. Though there have been some awestruck accounts of new measures like 360-degree system for performance review  (complementing the existing Annual Confidential Reports system), what still has not been addressed is the task of turning a job in civil services into a terminable contract. Redrafting the terms of employment of civil servants is important to shake the vice of stability that usually drives institutionalised mediocrity in government offices. For all practical purposes, discounting some exceptions, bureaucracy enjoys a degree of un-fire-ability that feeds the worst parasitic instincts that run counter to any idea of an ambitious country on the move and an economy seriously trying to reform itself.

Far from striking at the root of the halo that the idea of a job in government entails in the public psyche, the Prime Minister unwittingly contributed to such narratives of state-centric aspirations of the country in his 2014 Independence Day speech from the ramparts of the Red Fort. Making a distinction between the exalted nature of ‘service’ in public employment (though with all social and financial incentives) and work of a mere ‘job- holder’ is certainly a very wrong kind of encouragement the Prime Minister intended to give to the country’s bureaucracy which is already working in a society, which extends its uncritical acceptance of its mediocrity and exaggerated sense of self-importance. At the same time, in identifying the state as the key vehicle of his idea of development, Modi disincentivised a large pool of talented people working hard on their own or in private ventures. That’s certainly not something that a country aspiring to be global economic power should be telling its youth.

Second, beyond lip service, there has been a lack of will to attract specialists in bureaucratic positions which are ill-served by generalist bureaucrats. Lateral entry into higher positions into civil services is news, rather than being the norm. One competitive examination-based ticket to a career in civil services, that too rewarding generalist rote learning, is a regressive way of looking at the increasingly complex business of governance. The Modi government, like its predecessors, has failed in seeing that the resistance to such moves is coming from quarters which are most likely to be hit by such move- the career civil servants. Interestingly, this is also the reason why cabal-solidarity of bureaucrats sometimes work against the economic reforms which threaten some inexplicable powers that they enjoy under an interventionist state.The hurdles in realising the ease of doing business initiatives, for instance, can partly be attributed to bureaucrats not ready to let go their discretionary powers over operations as simple as setting up a business operation in India.

As they are engaged in protecting their turf, the Prime Minister has not shown any alacrity in seeing beyond the obvious and putting in place a structure to hire a talented workforce from specific fields for performing governmental functions which need domain expertise. NITI Aayog’s recent recommendation for attracting talent from the private sector for specific roles in government is a reminder of how the governance has suffered in the hands of generalists. However, such recommendation is least likely to find favour with a government whose idea of a pick-and-choose approach to bureaucracy has been limited to flushing out officers of United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and bringing Prime Minister’s trusted team of civil servants from Gujarat to key positions in Raisina Hill.

Third, Modi government has done little to restructure the recruitment process of civil servants. In fact, the government has gone a step further to make the examination conducted by Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) for hiring civil servants a hostage to populist politics.

Swinging between YK Alagh Committee and PC Hota Committee recommendations for reforming the process, the common suggestion was for lowering the maximum age of applicants. Surrendering to students demanding extra years to prepare for newly introduced Civil Services Aptitude Test (CSAT) by the UPSC at the preliminary stage, the UPA government made the expedient move to undermine the thrust of recommendations- extended the age by two more years to make it 32 for general category candidates and proportionately more for reserved category.

Faced with a fresh round of agitations by students from the Hindi heartland in Delhi against questions on basic English in a preliminary test, the Modi government made English component qualifying, that is, it was not to be counted to determine the list of candidates eligible for writing the Main examination. Subsequently, the government appointed Baswan committee to remodel the Main examination – recommendations of which are reportedly with the UPSC now. He may not realise but Modi has squandered three years by not trying to revamp the recruitment process which has always been plagued with all the ills of Indian examination system- rote-learning incentivising an assembly line of cramming robots, discouraging originality and creativity.

As much as he may hate admitting it, an overweight and smugly mediocre bureaucracy marks Modi’s brand of governance as it did in Nehru’s India of 1950s and early 60s. There are more elements of continuity, rather than change, in an institution designed to serve 18^th century government. That’s bad news for a government which would like to see itself as the flag bearer of reforms and would like to be called anything but Nehruvian. What, however, Modi has failed to realise is that the clichéd steel frame often turns into the stranglehold. He needs to free the economy, and hopefully the governance, from the Babu’s self-important poking nose. If not, Babudom could turn out to be his blind-spot.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @anandvardhan26.

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