A blow against hierarchy

Privileges of elite bureaucracy come under the scanner

The Delhi High Court has struck a blow for integrated education and against the privileges of the elite by directing the end of the 60 per cent quota for the children of "Grade A" government officers in the elite Sanskriti School in New Delhi's Chanakyapuri. The Court directed the Centre to examine the possibility of integrating Sanskriti into the existing Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan, the group of central schools set up for children of government servants. The school has been in existence since 1998, and is run by the Civil Services Society; it was set up by the wives of the then cabinet secretary, the foreign secretary, and the commerce secretary. The Court noted that that in 1995 "the cabinet secretary, the foreign secretary, the defence secretary, the commerce secretary, the secretary of the department of urban development, the advisor (staff) of the Railway Board and nine other senior officer of the Union government...took the decision that the ministry of urban development shall allot 7.78 acres of land in Chanakyapuri to the Civil Services Society at a token cost of Rs 1 with an annual premium of Rs 1". The school building and its infrastructure were created through public funds, and a Rs 10 crore corpus was established. The government also admitted that various government agencies and ministries had donated Rs 15.94 crore to the Society for the purposes of the school.

The Court is right to speak out for the integration of schools as a necessary first step towards ending privilege. "Reserving seats for a particular branch of the Indian services disadvantages children of persons engaged in other branches of the Indian services", it pointed out, and it amounted to unconstitutional "separate treatment". The ethos of the original Kendriya Vidyalayas was egalitarian and the institution was meant to be a location where the children of transferable officers could easily find admission. In the original years of the Kendriya Vidyalayas, many senior bureaucrats' children went to these schools; but, clearly, that impulse has come to an end. Certainly, there are larger questions to be asked about the nature of integration in India's schools, which is also one of the aims in the Right to Education Act, and the Court has gestured in that direction too. But the biggest lesson, surely, is that the elite central services must realise that the time when they could set themselves apart from other public employees, is fast coming to an end.

In various other areas, too, the senior officers of the Indian Administrative Service and other elite services have arrogated to themselves privileges that other public servants, not to mention the general public, can only envy. Even as the government has fulfilled its promise of following the "one-rank, one-pension" principle for the armed forces, it is a constant irritation that the IAS has ensured, through subtle engineering of the pension mechanism, that this principle applies to its own benefits. Sanskriti School is close to the gleaming new bureaucratic colony of New Moti Bagh, where luxurious houses have been built for senior officers of the elite services even as Delhi grows ever more crowded and expensive.

Then there are the medical privileges. Once upon a time, all branches of the government shared in the Central Government Health Services, or CGHS. Increasingly, however, the senior levels have withdrawn from the CGHS, first by granting themselves access to private hospitals and, most recently, by ensuring that in some cases they can be treated at public expense anywhere in the world, with air tickets and stay paid for by the taxpayer for themselves and a companion. Even as there is growing anger at the distance between the citizenry and their rulers, the elite bureaucracy seems deaf to the murmurings. The IAS speaks often of the post-Independence ethos of nation-building of which it believes it is one of the last hold-overs. If so, it should remember that the unity of those in government was an essential part of that ethos.