Sunanda K Datta-Ray: The changing face of bureaucracy

Upward mobility in India's meritocracy has helped create a more caring administration

Clearly, the civil service is a-changing. I don’t mean only the high drama of Alex Paul Menon’s ordeal in Sukma or Shruti Singh’s dedication in Bemetara, but simpler examples nearer home of those who, like Milton, also serve.

One officer has just shattered a long-held stereotype. That’s Arnab Roy, a man of few words, commissioner of Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC), which must surely be one of the world’s most thankless jobs. Looking on from outside, I would say that no one and nothing can make a dent in the KMC’s institutionalised corruption, laziness and inefficiency. Which is one reason Kolkata is “the sewer of south-east India” in the Berkeley Mather thriller I am reading.

I had gone to see the commissioner – an unknown to me – because I hadn’t received my property tax bill and didn’t want to be suddenly saddled with an exorbitant demand for arrears and penalty. “Printing is a little delayed,” he murmured and turning to the computer on his left, keyed in my reference number. Out popped the bill for which I was sweating. A few more taps on the keyboard and he handed me a “no arrears” certificate.

If you think that’s run of the mill, let me tell you of a report in a sympathetic British newspaper – probably the Guardian – some years ago saying every senior officer in Delhi had a computer in his room because Indians regarded it as the latest Western status symbol. But none of these computers was ever used because India’s official caste hierarchy identified keyboards with lowly stenographer-typists.

Arnab Roy disproved that British writer. So, I must confess, did Shyam Saran when I went into his office (he was national security adviser then) and thought it empty. No, Saran was hidden in a corner, bashing away at his PC. But Roy’s is the greater achievement for breaking a cast-iron Bengali bhadralok taboo. Unlike some other Indian Administrative Service (IAS) men whose incompetence demands ostentation, he dispensed with the flurry of peons and clerks. He handles the keyboard with smooth professionalism, in contrast to the men and women who work full-time with computers at the airport and in banks. It’s painful to watch them scanning keyboards with finger poised above, finding the right key and smashing it, repeating the clumsily slow process again and again.

What makes officers like Menon, Singh and Roy different? Their predecessors prompted Jawaharlal Nehru’s lament that his biggest failure was not changing the bureaucracy. “It’s still a colonial administration.” The main reason, I suspect, is that the early IAS struggled to imitate the Indian Civil Service, or ICS. Mani Shankar Aiyer told my son, Deep, that the services were “an escalator to social status”. If so, those aspirants forgot that the British already had status when they came to India as ICS men, if for no other reason that they were British. No amount of make-believe haw-hawing could turn middle class Punjabis or Tamils into gora sahibs.

I am talking of Deep’s book, Impossible possibilities: The making of Indian diplomacy, to be published by Columbia University Press, not as a puff but because, glancing at the manuscript, I see it throws interesting light on today’s bureaucrats. One entrant, the son of a manual labourer, told him, “I would have emigrated if I didn’t get into the services.” Another was born in a district overrun by Naxalites or “simply robbers and bandits devoid of any ideology” where 50,000 out of 1,200,000 people lived in state-run camps.

Did the irrepressible Mani exclaim “How on earth did you get out?” to him or to another boy whose ambition was to join the IAS and return to his district? Failing to do that, he thought of politics, then settled for the Indian Forest Service. His grandparents were forest dwellers who saw their first road, and even that “passed by their forest”, in the 1920s. There was a village by his father’s time. The railhead serving a narrow gauge railway is about 80 km away, the nearest town 300 km. A road was finally built but the village remained cut off during the monsoons until the 1980s. He first watched television as an 18-year-old, class-11 student in a town.

Impossible possibilities makes the point in passing – its central theme is very different – that upward mobility in India’s meritocracy has helped to create a more caring and connected bureaucracy. What Philip Woodruff’s Founders and Guardians did out of paternalistic duty, today’s Menons, Singhs and Roys are doing for themselves and their own. Nehru wouldn’t have been disappointed.

 

sunandadr@yahoo.co.in