All posts by Priyatu

End the IAS : Is it a solution?

“By whatever constitution India may be ruled, no government will be able to ‘do without District Officer”

– (Simon Commission Report, 1928)

“End the IAS”

– Mihir S Sharma

This article is a searching response to another article by Sharma that said that the IAS must go. The article appeared on June 5, 2015, in Business Standard.

 

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PART I

 

The IAS is akin to the top management of an impossibly large and complex entity called India. Every large and complex entity needs administration without which it would return to chaos, the natural state of things. This administration is provided by a system that may vary in shape and complexity depending upon the master it must serve. Easier to manage societies like pastoral and tribal societies require fewer people to manage, and fewer laws and rules to guide their day to day life. Life being simple, the structure around life is simple. The inherent Brownian motion in society would create more complex systems as populations grow. Life now being complex, the structures around life would be complex.

This administration is normally called bureaucracy. Weber, one of the founders of modern sociology, was one of the foremost thinkers on bureaucracy:

“[His] interest in the nature of power and authority, as well as his pervasive preoccupation with modern trends of rationalization, led him to concern himself with the operation of modern large-scale enterprises in the political, administrative, and economic realm. Bureaucratic coordination of activities, he argued, is the distinctive mark of the modern era. Bureaucracies are organized according to rational principles. Offices are ranked in a hierarchical order and their operations are characterized by impersonal rules. Incumbents are governed by methodical allocation of areas of jurisdiction and delimited spheres of duty. Appointments are made according to specialized qualifications rather than ascriptive criteria. This bureaucratic coordination of the actions of large numbers of people has become the dominant structural feature of modern forms of organization. Only through this organizational device has large- scale planning, both for the modern state and the modern economy, become possible. Only through it could heads of state mobilize and centralize resources of political power, which in feudal times, for example, had been dispersed in a variety of centers. Only with its aid could economic resources be mobilized, which lay fallow in pre-modern times.

– http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/undergraduate/introsoc/weber12.html

Weber’s model of bureaucracy was essentially based around six principles, all of which are still valid today.  Of course, Weber was not the only thinker to either analyse bureaucracy or to define it. But let’s keep this discussion less theoretical and more practical.

Thus, when Sharma says ‘end the IAS’, one answer could be – yes, by all means do that. But whatever replacement you have in mind, would be another bureaucracy. You may call it management, managerial ring, cloud nine, abra cadabra, or what you will. It will still remain a bureaucracy. Of course, one can devise the new bureaucracy differently. One can change this bit and that bit. But it would still retain its DNA as a bureaucracy. Talking of change, cannot the present system be changed? Of course it can, it has and it does! The only unchanging thing is the fire in the hell, they tell me. Without again turning this into another history lesson, the post of the Collector or its equivalent have seen changes in power, responsibilities and mandate constantly before independence. Post independence, the whole civil service changed, starting from the name itself (from ICS to IAS), the colour of the skin of the men and women manning (womanning?!) the service, bosses (from Queen to the President, certainly a change of sex as we mostly have male Presidents), language of official discourse (from purely English to English mixed with vernaculars), attitude (from colonial to democratic) and others. The list of the statutes that name the Collector, or more recently, the Deputy Commissioner, is myriad. With each such naming, the Collector and others are statutorily required to take on new responsibilities. Were there any other such office on which such responsibilities could be bestowed, they would have been. So long as we have nation states, we would have someone heading them. So long as we have lesser units like our states, we would have someone heading them. So long as there are districts, we would have someone heading them. So long as we have sub-divisions, we would have someone heading them. So long as we have villages and towns, we would have someone heading them. Oh, lest I forget, so long as there are companies, we would have someone heading them too. The cobbler shop, the restaurant, the school, the hospital, the everything – leadership is required at every level that must be provided by someone or something (although I am not sure Artificial Intelligence will be given leadership positions within the next fifty years).

So yes, the IAS may be banned theoretically, but it would be replaced by its doppelganger.

But only theoretically. “The services known at the commencement of this Constitution as the Indian Administrative Service and the Indian Police Service shall be deemed to be services created by Parliament under this article”, so says Article 312(2). Articles are the provisions of the constitution, and they are of two types – those that can be amended/deleted, and those that cannot be amended/deleted, as they fall foul of the basic structure of our constitution. Evolving from earlier, the doctrine of basic structure was robustly threshed out in the Keshavananda Bharti case, and the federal structure of the constitution is universally agreed to be part of this. I am not sure if the Supreme Court has specifically enunciated if the IAS and IPS are part of basic structure, but they are part of the very fabric of the federal character of our nation – and the federal character is a basic structure. As we saw earlier, a provision that is part of the basic structure, cannot be amended/deleted.

So, the legal situation is this. Firstly, IAS and IPS are constitutional services, and hence sacrosanct. It is not impossible but difficult to amend the constitution. Very difficult. But stop. IAS may also be part of the basic structure (I am just saying maybe) of our constitution, and that CANNOT be amended (again that is not entirely true. You would need to pack up half the judges of the Supreme Court and tell them to say that the federal structure is not part of the basic structure, and if they say so, lo and behold, it is no more a basic structure. Then you can amend the constitution in the normal way, which as we saw earlier, is not a very easy thing to do).

Thus, if Sharma is to ban the IAS, he will have a few legal hurdles to cross. But let’s be romantic, and not be bound by the mores of fallible men. The history of mankind is a jamboree of the unthinkable. The Arab Spring of 2010 and thereafter saw the socio-political foundations of more than a dozen countries cast asunder by tidal waves of emotions in the hearts of the young and the restless.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven! (Wordsworth)
I want to be young. The funny thing about our constitution is that it still harbours many provisions that the Supreme Court has already termed unconstitutional! Sample Article 368(5) that says “For the removal of doubts, it is hereby declared that there shall be no limitation whatever on the constituent power of Parliament to amend by way of addition, variation or repeal the provisions of this Constitution under this article”. The legislature, in its constituent role, can make any change, any provision in the constitution – including the very amending article (368) itself! Or so it wishes. The Supreme Court says, cool down – you cannot make or unmake anything.
But the constitution itself is a historical document. It was born in a context. It is not even very old, and already pockmarked with a hundred changes. One can think of a time when this constitution goes and another comes. Pakistan already is having its third constitution post-independence. The famed unwritten constitution of England is mostly documented. It has a Supreme Court it did not have earlier. Nations come and nations go. It is a haughty man that thinks that anything created by man cannot be undone. Or that man and mankind itself cannot be undone. There are more things in heaven and earth, dear men of law,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Sharma is right. The IAS can end, damn the legal hurdles.
But why should it end?
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Shit! There’s too much shit around!

Shit!

That’s what I wondered when I looked out, for the nth time, from the window of the Delhi Kalka morning Shatabdi. Trips to Delhi has been a little frequent lately, and wife is happier consequently [don’t think otherwise! Wifey stays in Delhi, and she is happy to find me frequenter there]. Mostly, on my way back to the hills, I catch the Shatabdi. That brings me to the issue of shit.

  • India has the second largest population in the world, and soon we may be numero uno. Consequently, we shit an awful lot. Soon, we would be the shittiest country in the world, overtaking China [which, the capitalists have been telling us, is the shittiest place anyway].
  • Even today, the majority in India do not have household or communal sanitary toilets. That means they shit wherever they find place. India is a mighty densely packed place – so what was once a fallow field has not turned into swarming slums. You throw a stone today, and there is a 12.3445% chance that it would hit a man, and 9.453% chance that it would hit a woman [being the shameless lot, men shit over a wider time horizon; women flock together in time while shitting]. Okay, I made that up, but you get the idea.
  • The government has been trying to get people to shit in their homes, in sanitary toilets. Earlier, it gave money to the people to shit likewise. The people ate the money, and shat more – in the open. Some built the toilets. Since they could not understand what to do with it, they did whatever they could. Some converted the toilets into the store, some into an extra room. There are apparently cases where the toilet were converted into the domestic temples. That being the tale, one does no know what all this hoopla is about regarding the utterances of Jairam Ramesh and Narender Modi.
  • Later the government thought that giving money on prepaid basis was not working. So they thought up the postpaid formula – build a toilet first, and then you can claim the money. This required a lot of brainwashing. In Himachal Pradesh, we thought we would do better – we cajoled the people into building toilets, and we did not pay them even. The money saved thus were ploughed back into community assets. We called the program Total Sanitation Campaign. The mandarins in the capital have now renamed it Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan, for whatever reason. We should take the bull by its horns and call it Hagandari Mukt abhiyan, as many practitioners actually call it.
  • When we were probationers, we had our baptism in development process through this scheme, among others. My first trip in the field, on the very first morning in the district, was to a function honouring those who had won awards for sanitation [Nirmal Gram Puraskar]. When I became a BDO, my first substantive posting, my broke my public speaking virginity by talking about shit, literally. Any place with more than five persons would have me launch me into the topic of shit and shitting. Long lectures had to be devised. I was the missionary teaching all the gospel of shitting.
  • My next posting was to the Spiti Valley, bordering the more famous Ladakh. Water freezes for half the year, leaving you high and dry literally [Spiti is at 3600 metres]. The geography makes people shit in what are called dry-toilets – toilets that uses no water for flushing, and seldom for ablutions. The toilet is just a room on the first floor with a hole in it, and shit just pops down on the ground floor. The shit is picked up and ploughed back in the farms the next summer as manure. Temperatures are seldom high enough for decomposition of the shit – that being the case, I am sure I have eaten and drunk an awful lot of shit. Spiti is part of Lahoul and Spiti district, and the former valley is famous for its potatoes. These potatoes are the seed potatoes that have been used throughout India for farming of potatoes for the chips and french fries industry. If you trace the MacDonalds and Lays potatoes, many would go back to Lahoul. So, chances are you have eaten a lot of shitty DNA in potatoes as well! During my posting there, I had the occasion to do a workshop on Ecological Sanitation, or EcoSan, in Trichy, Tamil Nadu. EcoSan is a technique of shitting and storing of shit wherein the piss and shit are segregated through separate holes during the shitting process, and stored in separate anaerobic containers/tanks – the warm oxygen-free environment breaks down all shitty bacteria, and you have fertiliser from your piss [that you can spray in the fields], and manure from your shit. We were taken to live sites, and were invited to open the toilet pits for hold the manure. Some did, I could not. Lecturing is good enough for me!

During these trips back to the hills, I realised that we still have to go a long way. It’s an easy task in Himachal where most people own a homestead which they can use to build a toilet. Much of India does not own its own homestead – that leaves open the question of where to shit. The only obvious answer seems to be the community toilet, but with such low community spirits as we have in India, maintenance of these toilets is problematic. Kapil Sharma, the comedian, chides a British who says he built the railways to run trains in India – you idiot, you made it so difficult for us to shit on the tracks now, as the trains keep coming! I realised what density means. People were shitting together as if it was a ceremonial and communal thing, quite different from the personal and private affair shitting is for all of us reading this post. It is also a natural thing and people not shitting around were least bothered. People walked beside those shitting, and there was hardly a fart. As the trains pass by, no one bothers to lift his ass – you can watch my royal ass or all I care. As they say, when you feel like shitting, you don’t bother if the King is beckoning you! The shit-yards are getting fuller and fuller, and the tide of shit is getting closer and closer to the hutments and the slums. I realised, shitting being common to both the sexes, the fairer sex was hardly the shy variety – they shit with as much concentration as their menfolk – please don’t disturb us while we shit. Inside the coaches the passengers pulled down the perforated drapes, a typical reaction of ours – out of sight, out of mind. That shit on his yard is not my problem. I looked on, shit or no shit. The green and warm plains looked good as I enjoyed the last few hours of good living before heading back to the shitty hills!

Choice posting

The Personnel departments in most states, and the Centre, are a dreadful lot. Much like Finance, a posting there ruffles more features than it soothes. However, the aura of power of these departments draw the sturdy lot to them. The Personnel department controls much of the professional lives of the IAS officers. And most important, in the context of the states, is that they control the postings – or so they say. In reality, it may be that the Personnel just approves what others, including the political higher ups, decide. Be that as it may, the saying goes that what a man proposes, Personnel disposes. Wiser heads say that never tell Personnel what you want – you may get anything, but what you tell them you want! Those wiser heads advice one to ask what one does not desire, and chances are you might get what you want instead. Postings have been coming fast lately. When I was posted out last, I had changed places four times in fourteen months. Much like the red badge of honour, frequent change in postings can be claimed to be the award for courage and fortitude in the face of a declining decorum in public life. It gives me real pleasure to tell all strangers about the frequent postings, with a puffed up chest. Much like the examples in the books, I have never asked for a choice posting. Don’t praise me – I was never asked, and I never thought it fit enough to go on and ask myself. Recently, however, there has been some changes in the stars. Senior officers asked me if I wanted to get a certain department – the post was getting vacant, albeit temporarily, as the incumbent was going on a three month leave. One very influential officer asked me if I wanted another big department or the one above – I did not even bat my eye, and muttered – give me that one. And that one I got, a couple of days later. It’s still early days. But working here has been tremendously satisfying – something that I can seldom say about most other postings I have had.

UPDATE

On 6th January, 2013, just three months onwards, the charge for this post was taken away. Learning of the day: postings, choice or otherwise, are uncertain like the local weather or the girlfriend’s love.

Hike to Jakhu

Shimla hides many charms. One of them is creeping out of the cozy quilt on a chilly Sunday morning, walking through the shadowy roads and walking towards the sun-kissed hill tops. Many can find this charm alone; lesser souls like me need some company to make this effort worthwhile. Coaxing a lazy person to do this Herculean task is, well, Herculean. But when you coax a senior person to accompany you, you better make sure you are there on time. That requires a fidgety sleep waiting for the early alarm on the cellphone in the morning, and then getting ready with a stomach-full of maggi – the bachelor man’s best friend (after internet).

My companion is a veteran on the streets of Shimla. I am told he has a team of like-minded enthusiasts who are in the habit of jumping out the quilts on chilly Sunday mornings – my, my…just what I needed to evolve beyond Homo Sapiens.

This day we planned on hiking to Jakhu, a small Kali temple on top of a hill that has seen all kinds of monkeys and British folks from the earliest days. The British left Shimla to chaos; monkeys remain. Jakhu is a temple for Kali, also called Shyamala (or, the dark one) – I am told Shyamala gave us the name Shimla, earlier called Simla. We decided to make our way up from the outer Mall Road, diverting from the right fork from the Rahat Hotel. We walked beyond the SP residence, the Radha Soami camp, the BSNL office, and then to Jakhu hilltop. I couldn’t see much of birds, and my deaf ears could make very little of the birdsong going on around us. But the sweet company, and the little exercise made my day.

The True Meaning of Life

We are visitors on this planet.
We are here for ninety
Or one hundred years
at the very most.
During this period,
We must try to do something
good, something useful,
with our lives.
If you contribute to other
people’s happiness, you will
find the true goal,
the true meaning of life.
      – His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.