Rap on the knuckles

FROM the pen of a bureaucrat who has worked with Karnataka Chief Ministers Devaraj Urs and Veerappa Moily - to mention two - comes a second book. It introspects and concludes that what is wrong with the Indian Civil Service is predominantly politics.

This time, S. K. Das - who is no debutante author, having published Civil Service Reforms some years ago, and wedged in a rollicking, "excruciatingly funny" novel on the last of a clan of prodigiously libidinous rulers and their capers (The Last Lambada) while he was at it - shows how a book can be enjoyable despite an index, cross-references and bibliographies.

In this book, Das traces the creation of bureaucracy, in the 19th Century, and its degeneration to being rated as one of the most corrupt in the world today.

Controlling corruption, he informs us wryly, was just as daunting a challenge in the 19th Century as it is in the new millennium. And a merit based bureaucracy, with a pay-structure that rewarded civil servants for honest effort, was seen as the solution. It was assumed that if merit was made the basis for administration, it would exclude private interest.

Das has found in the Indian experience, that the merit-based civil service in colonial India, which was retained post- Independence has failed to restrain corruption. Politics has cast its long, relentless shadow on the civil service.

As ruling politicians have preferences on how to use a public bureaucracy, which translate into an incentive structure, which in turn governs the behaviour of civil servants and public bureaucracies, Das says, can display radically different standards of integrity.

The book is no carping, complaining diatribe on the ills dogging bureaucracy, thankfully. Das builds on the analysis of the alternative paradigm, the New Public Management Model being implemented in New Zealand, Australia, Sweden and the United Kingdom. And he argues that this paradigm has all the credentials to succeed in restraining corruption in public office.

After all, two centuries of banking on an old paradigm that has outlived its uses had replaced an earlier one - when many States and principalities replaced their patronage bureaucracies with merit-based ones. Poised on the brink of a third paradigm shift - the patronage bureaucracy, which was based on loyalty to the rulers and public office was used pugnaciously for private gain, to merit based ones, the civil service in Indian has come full circle with merit acceding to the "superiority" of political patronage of the present.

Das' nostrum for the ills dogging bureaucracy is quite clear. Keep politics out, certainly. But that is not enough. The old paradigm fails thanks to its refusal to see that merit and expertise are inadequate to depoliticise administration. This involves, at the minimum, a restructuring of the relations between a public bureaucracy and the ruling politicians.

Having said this, Das concludes that the civil service system has to be made responsive to political direction, offset the evil of patrimonial politics and respond to its legitimate authority. And delivers a mild rap on the knuckles of his own tribe, with grace and a touch of humour that refuses to keep the raconteur in Das down.

ALLADI JAYASRI

Public Office, Private Interest - Bureaucracy And Corruption In India, S. K. Das, Oxford University Press, Rs. 575.

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