Devangshu Datta: When inefficiency pays

VIEWPOINT

In a whimsical moment, SF doyen Frank Herbert thought up the Bureau of Sabotage (BuSab). BuSab is a government department of an advanced pan-galactic civilisation. Its motto is “In Lieu of Red Tape”.

BuSab’s task is to slow down legislation and administration by fair means or foul. BuSab ensures that no government policy is speedily implemented. Thus, it prevents irreparable damage when policy is bad.

Its agent is Saboteur extraordinary Jorj X McKie. McKie is an ugly little man, who combines the violent aura of James Bond with the shyster skills of Perry Mason. He wanders from planet to planet, using blasters and legal arguments at his convenience, seducing aliens, and making sure to gum up governance.

Beneath the whimsy, there is truth. Efficient governments can cause magnitudes more damage than inefficient governments. Inefficiency does, at the least, offer breathing space where policy is either ill-considered or downright monstrous.

To take an extreme example, compare Mussolini’s Italy to Hitler’s Germany. The regimes had similar sick ideologies. But Hitler killed a lot more people because Germany had far better governance.

More insidiously, consider the sterilisation drives of the Emergency and the concurrent drives in China. In the 1970s, mainstream consensus was that India and China had to directly implement population control. India’s Ministry of Health & Family Planning penned funny slogans and randomly sterilised. China did much better.

The policy itself was wrong. India now has a potential demographic dividend because its population will overtake that of China. India’s population mainly consists of young people who could be productive for decades. China’s fastest-growing demographic is ageing “little princes”; single children produced under strict quotas.

China has done many things right and it is overwhelmingly more efficient. The results show in the gross GDP and per capita numbers, gleaming infrastructure, better health statistics and higher literacy. But the PRC’s policies also caused famines that starved 70 million to death. The Cultural Revolution sent intellectuals off to plant rice.

It may even be argued that China’s hitherto successful economic policies have left it over-dependent on exports, and handcuffed it to the US. With its key markets in freefall, the PRC is switching to servicing higher domestic consumption. But a lot of people will be hurt during the transition. Unemployment could go off the scale.

India’s governments have a history of appalling inefficiency. But it didn’t notch up 70 million starvation deaths. Nor is it that correlated to the global economy despite its stated commitment to encouraging exports. This is simply because it is a much less efficient government. The lunacies of planning and licensing prevented export promotion from being that effective.

Of course, most of the time, the inefficiency is a prime cause of under-performance.

But it does prevent the odd mega-disaster. At the moment, for example, one is thankful that the GoI lacks the decisiveness to go to war in a knee-jerk response to 26/11. The twin-messes in Iraq and Afghanistan suggest the result would not be optimal.

India is unprepared to prosecute and win such a war. It needs to learn from the mistakes the Americans made. It needs to evolve and internalise concrete effective responses to terrorism. India’s home-grown BuSabs must be reformed. All those uncoordinated departments that oversee little empires in the security and defence establishments have to learn to think out of the box and work together.

Our inefficiency has left us wide-open to periodic outrages like 26/11. It has also prevented us from plunging headlong into fighting the wrong kind of war. We cannot, however, ever become capable of fighting and winning the right kind of war without eliminating this inefficiency.