The Modi regime must not hesitate to crack down on officials, present and past, who have bled the Indian public sector dry. Profitable ventures such as Air India have been turned into loss-making enterprises by these babus
India wants to see a Government with a difference. Prime Minister Narendra Modi certainly set the tone in his second Cabinet meeting, where he asked the Ministers to showcase it in 100 days through closer interaction and shared responsibilities.
These 100 days would bring in two more crucial statements through the presidential address to the joint session of Parliament and presentation of the Budget. That would help people judge this regime that has raised great expectations.
Everyone wants Mr Modi to bring those ‘acchhe din’ people have been dreaming of. The message of confidence through the invitation to the SAARC leaders has made people looking for more. Sustaining hope is not an easy task. The loose governance of the past 10 years has besotted Mr Modi with an array of problems, in the lack of attitude of the bureaucracy to look at issues, and delivery and empathy that is for the public good.
This has to be changed for the nation to take a stride. If Mr Modi wants the economy to look up, he has to make the bureaucracy slog. While the political leadership of the previous Government may be responsible in failing to deliver, the worst culprit was the babus. They indulged in politicking and harassed the people and their own staff who raised saner issues, by ‘convincing’ the political masters that ‘such people’ had become ‘politically inconvenient’.
A large number of people, within and outside the Government, were humiliated and victimised by the ‘real rajas’. The then political masters, in the belief that the officials were exhibiting their loyalty, refused to even listen to the victims of bureaucratic high-handedness. This made the lower rung of the bureaucracy lethargic; not that they always wanted to, but they adopted the motto that no work is better than working and suffering. It has afflicted the entire governmental process. Many of today’s large pending tasks thaw in decision-making and the lack of governance emanated from here.
It is crucial for every aspect of governance. The lower rung of bureaucracy is possibly more important than the few top heads coming from the elite civil services, who mostly want to rule through snobbery, stiff-necked approach and reproaching their junior colleagues.
If decision-making has to be expedited for hosts of projects, this Government has to show that difference. Corruption brewed in the previous regime because none was prepared to listen to the aggrieved and humiliated people.
The common link in the suffering of giant Air India to tiny Indian Institute of Mass Communication rests here. The same persons who sank AI also sabotaged small boats, and those bosses, said to have made crores by fleecing these organisations, have gone scot-free. The plea of the lower staff has gone unheard.
This needs to be corrected through the creation of the listening posts within the Government as also meting out exemplary punishment to those — some of them former Secretaries — who made the lower staff provide all that they were not entitled to, from booze at official cost to air tickets for visiting their home towns, home theatres, sophisticated mobile phones, membership of elite clubs, official cars or taxis for their families etc. These officials need not only to be publicly shamed but their pensions and other benefits should also be attached. They should be made to pay for the thousands of crores of losses these organisations have suffered.
It should also be probed as to how they managed post-retirement monetarily hefty jobs for doing nothing. Whatever they have been paid must be realised from them with interest. The myth that civil services officials can go unpunished, has to be busted. The country is suffering not so much for the apathy of the past political masters as due to the misdeed of these ‘elite’ officials.
Fixing these responsibilities has to be the primary task. It is not witch-hunting as some would claim. It is a necessary cleansing process to ensure probity. It is a complex task, but, if the Government wants to deliver on the economic front it has to create the mechanism to address it to bring the confidence back in those working in the Government and those who deal with it.
Many of these officials have a penchant for lying low before their masters and chalking out plans that they ‘understand’ will please their bosses. Foreign direct investment has been one such area. The Foreign Investment Promotion Board and the Planning Commission, during the past few years, cleared many proposals which were definitely not in the interest of the country. For instance, proposals of a company to take over two profit-making cement firms, were cleared without going into the finer points. It has drained the country more in terms of repatriation and ‘technical fee’ than the company had invested. The officials involved in such decisions need to be questioned.