Working in wonderland

A govt employee is invulnerable. The chances of being dismissed for non-performance are the same as the chance of being caught for travelling without a ticket on the Bombay suburban trains

Last month I had written in this column that I had difficulty, after finishing one book, deciding what to read next. I mean, how do you go from Jeffery Archer to Jeffery Sachs?

Many people thought I didn’t have anything to read and offered many tips. One even suggested Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But someone actually sent me a book, his own.

It has a neutral title — Through the Looking Glass — but is actually about something that is a major bee in my aging bonnet, namely, how do people who join the government on short-term contracts fare when in it. I should confess here that my son is one of them.

The author of this thoughtful book is Akhilesh Tilotia. He has worked for Axis Bank, the Kotak Group, and Boston Consulting. At present he is working for the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund.

This book is important because the Modi government is experimenting with bringing in outside talent given that 80 per cent of what it has inside is unemployable anywhere except in government.

Mr Tilotia says sometime in 2015 he received a call from Jayant Sinha’s office. Mr Sinha was minister of state in the finance ministry then and asked if they could meet.

So Mr Tilotia and his boss went over to Delhi and they discussed the economy. About a year later Mr Tilotia received a call from Mr Sinha asking if he would like to join the ministry as an Office on Special Duty (OSD). He said sure.

But it was not in the finance ministry that he would work because Mr Sinha was soon moved to civil aviation. And that’s where Mr Tilotia worked for two and a half years.

The ‘System’: Mr Tilotia makes it clear that this is not a kiss-and-tell book and that “if you are looking for masala, there is none.” Arguably, that is an honourable approach but a few more examples of how things happen — or don’t — in the government would have been useful.

In the end, though, said Mr Tilotia, the old, post-1945 question remains: if the State is to be an agent of change, does the ‘System’ help or impede?

Mr Tilotia declines to offer a binary answer but he does have this to say: “The current system of governance is mired under the weight of processes, procedures and precedence with little or no responsibility for outcomes.”

Having long been an advocate of abolishing permanent employment that the government offers, I was particularly interested in what he might have to say about it in the context of accelerating change.

He says it is rare for someone to be reprimanded, let alone be sacked. He quotes an answer given by the minister concerned in the Rajya Sabha on April 5, 2018. The minister said only around five or six employees of the government were removed from service.

But under Mr Modi the number has been increasing gradually. Even so, it is a microscopic percentage of the total numbers employed.

In other words, a government employee is invulnerable. In terms of probability, the chances of being dismissed for non-performance are the same as the chance of being caught for travelling without a ticket on the Bombay suburban trains.

That’s why things are what they are. Let me quote: ‘Coming from the private sector the first thing that will strike you is that there is no one thing anyone is trying to optimise on...there are no uni-dimensional perspectives to government.”

This means, as Sir Humphrey Appleby said in Yes, Minister, activity amounts to output. That’s why the section on bureaucracy is downright funny. It reminds me of the lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “you blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things…”

The outsider: So moving to the core issue: how does the System treat an outsider? Overall, after reading this book, I got the impression that it doesn’t give a damn.

Mr Tilotia reiterates what is well known: how you are treated depends on how “close” you are seen to be to the source of power, in this case the minister. An OSD is judged by this, as are others.

If he has a direct entrance from his room to the minister’s, well, that’s it, he is treated with respect — for the moment. But what the minister giveth, he taketh away also.

To conclude, I have a suggestion for the author. Instead of calling his book Through the Looking Glass he should call it  Alice in Wonderland.

After all, both are written by the same person, Lewis Carroll.