Less paper, please

The real way to have security in ministries

The investigation into corporate espionage continues to expand, with two more individuals arrested in New Delhi on Thursday. According to the police, the two men were the assistant of a member of the Union Public Service Commission and a private secretary to a high-ranking bureaucrat in the environment ministry. This follows the original operation, which made arrests of some individuals attempting to steal papers from the petroleum ministry. Others were subsequently arrested, including a former journalist who operates a website on oil industry facts and executives of well-known companies - Reliance Industries, Reliance ADAG, Essar, Cairn India and Jubilant Energy. The companies themselves have not been named in the First Information Reports, and the police have not revealed any evidence of direct involvement of any corporate higher-ups in the wrongdoing for which the five executives have been arrested.

While it is welcome that the government is taking steps to check low-level espionage, and hopefully there will be enough evidence for successful prosecutions that will act as some sort of a deterrent, it is important to note certain caveats. First of all, such leaks of documents are neither new nor are they limited to particular ministries. Documents have been passed around wholesale since the 1980s at least. Governments have always found it difficult to check this process. While clearing up individual espionage rings is a valuable effort, it should not be seen as anything more than window-dressing unless substantive administrative reform accompanies it. The government is considering, for example, access-control mechanisms in departments and updated electronic surveillance. However, the fate of the closed-circuit television cameras in the petroleum ministry should serve as a warning. Those were introduced as the way to control petty theft of secrets; but in the attempt that was foiled, the cameras had been disabled. India simply does not run a high-security government - not because of a lack of hardware, but because it has the wrong processes in place. There is simply too much paper flying around with commercially valuable secrets, and too many people have access to it. There is no technological quick fix for this fact. However, there are other ways to address the problem.

For example, the first Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC) in the mid-1960s had made a pertinent recommendation. Change from an "office"-based approach to decision-making, argued the ARC, to an "officer"-based approach. Files would be the property and responsibility of individual officers - the aim was to eliminate the "noting" system completely. The primary purpose of this was not to increase security, but to reduce paperwork and delays, and increase efficiency. However, security would be an important by-product. Those enclaves within the government where such a system works demonstrate this. Of course, there is the additional point that those ministries and departments that handle an excessive amount of commercially sensitive information will continue to be targeted for that reason. Naturally, the decrease of discretion in such matters will mean that there is less information that private companies will be willing to pay for - which will be good news all around, and put less pressure on the system. Overall, this investigation is good news; but the government, if it is really serious about security, should fix its processes.