 "The former Planning Commission office in Sansad Marg")
AN UPSTART IN GOVERNMENT
JOURNEYS OF CHANGE AND LEARNING
Author: Arun Maira
Publisher: Rupa Publications
Pages: 236
Price: Rs 450
I reported for work in Yojana Bhavan, the imposing office of the Planning Commission on Parliament Street, a short distance from the Indian Parliament's beautiful, circular building in New Delhi. A senior officer of the Planning Commission met me accompanied by his staff. He explained to me the facilities that would be given to me so that I could 'concentrate on my work for the country,' in his words.
I would have seven personal staff attached to me - secretaries, attendants, et cetera! I could not suppress my amusement. I said, 'As chairman of the Boston Consulting Group, I shared a secretary with another officer.'
'Oh, but you will have a lot more work to do here,' he said. He went on to say that he was amused whenever he went abroad to meetings with senior government officials in so-called 'developed' countries and found that they would go to the coffee machine for their own coffee. Imagine a senior person wasting precious time making coffee, time he could have used better to address matters of vital importance to his nation! I would not have to do such trivial things myself, he declared proudly: the government of India was better organized.
Among the seven staff assigned to me, the principal duties of two were paper carrying and door opening. When I stepped out of my room for a meeting with the deputy chairman, my door was opened before I could reach it by one man who stood impassively behind it. The other tried to take my little notebook from my hand so that he could carry it for me down the corridor to the deputy chairman's meeting room. I resisted. In the corridor, I found my colleagues in the Planning Commission walking along the corridor to the meeting with their assigned paper-carriers behind them, notebooks and files in hand. When we arrived in the deputy chairman's meeting room, they sat down and their files were dutifully placed before them on the table.
When the meeting was over, I found all the paper-carriers, including my own, waiting to relieve us of our papers and notebooks. I kept mine. When I reached my office, the door was wide open waiting for me to enter, an invisible door-opening staff member standing behind it. It was a relief that I could save my mental energy for important national matters and not have to waste it to open doors! Perhaps I should have been grateful for all the help the government was giving me so that I could do my job….
My job, as the prime minister had charged me, was to develop a new strategy to grow India's manufacturing sector, using new ideas that would have to come from outside government. Time was very short. I wanted to quickly reach out to many people in industry, and to many thought leaders in India and abroad….
The Commission had many advisers, some with doctorates in their fields, who had been in the Commission and government for decades. They had experience in government. Perhaps they could help me. When I turned to them to help me bring in outsiders to work with us, they were amused by my innocence. They would have to teach me how the government worked. If I wanted to arrange a meeting in the Commission with outsiders, they would be glad to prepare a note 'on file', which I should approve. Then invitations would go out by speed post.….
Other new members of the Planning Commission had also been charged by the prime minister to bring in fresh thinking …[and] they, too, felt handicapped by the resistance to change within the Commission. In an internal meeting of the Planning Commission's Members with the deputy chairman, Montek Ahluwalia, a request was made to allow every member to have two individuals of his or her choice from outside the Commission, or even outside government, so that new ideas could be brought in and distilled.
Files were moved to obtain the requisite government approvals to recruit these persons. The files meandered from desk to desk within the Commission, and then to other desks in other ministries whose approvals were also required - finance, personnel, and training, and so on - and back onto desks in the Commission. … I asked Montek whether he could accelerate the government's tardy approval procedures. He expressed his inability and asked me to reach out to my friends outside the government for help.
I first approached R Gopalakrishnan, executive director of Tata Sons, who oversaw the Tata Administrative Services (TAS)…. Could the TAS depute a young, public-spirited officer to work with me for a year at no cost to the government? … Besides, I promised to provide a rich experience to the candidate that would exceed the TAS's requirements for developing leaders. Gopal agreed readily. I made the same request to Anand Mahindra, who also agreed. The Tata and Mahindra groups would depute young officers on sabbaticals from their companies for a year, and pay their salaries….
Montek thought my solution was a good idea, but wanted to be sure that no government rule was being breached. He asked the bureaucrats in the Planning Commission to check out my proposition. I was asked on what basis should a Member be seeking external assistance. I would have to follow the proper procedure to make my case for this, and only then could the question of the costs and payments if any for the assistance be considered….
One of these good bureaucrats in the Commission volunteered to help me. 'We have a scheme for appointing consulting organizations to do specific tasks for us,' he said. 'Why don't you describe what you want as a task to be done, and we will follow the procedure of advertising and asking for bids, and then selecting the best based on capability and cost. Fortunately, this process does not require the involvement of any other ministry and we can complete it in a month if we move the file around fast within the Commission, and I will help you with this,' he offered.
The requirement was advertised within twenty-four hours. After the stipulated two weeks, the bids would be opened and scrutinized by a committee, which I would chair, according to the governmental procedure.
My helpful and wise friend in the Planning Commission warned me that these two persons could not be hired as individuals - there was another, more complicated process for that. They would have to form themselves into a consulting company and bid as one company to take advantage of the shorter process he had recommended.
The two young officers, Sriram Ramchandran of the Mahindra group and Varoon Raghavan of the Tata group, who had never met each other before, now had to work together very quickly to overcome the first of the many governmental procedural hurdles they would encounter when they would begin their work with me. They put their heads together and formed 'Paradigm Consulting', which bid for the work….
Paradigm Consulting, whose two principals guaranteed that they would be full time with the Commission for one year, won the technical qualification round quite easily. Then came the time to open the financial bids. Sriram and Varoon proposed to do the work pro bono. … However, my wise friend in the Commission suggested that a nil cost bid would attract too much attention. It would be best that they quote some small amount. He suggested one lakh rupees, and so they bid. All the other bids were much higher: those from the large consulting companies very much higher, of course. Paradigm Consulting was selected. Now to work!
But where? Things are never simple in a procedure-bound bureaucracy. Only individuals paid by the Commission, as employees or as individual consultants, can be provided office space within the Commission's premises, some rule said. Since Sriram and Varoon were engaged as Paradigm Consulting, they could not be given any office space….Around that time, a director in the Industry division was assigned a larger room. When he moved out of his smaller room, he suggested that Sriram and Varoon use it until someone asked them to vacate it. So they began to use a room on the top floor of the building, a room with a desk, a chair, a large couch, and a whiteboard. …
As the team grew, and more people had to be accommodated in the room with the one chair and couch, I requested the Planning Commission for surplus furniture elsewhere in the building to be given to them. A wise bureaucrat suggested I withdraw my official request. No one seemed to have sat up and noticed that people who were not being paid by the Commission were working within it. 'Do not bring this to anyone's notice on file,' she said, 'or they may be asked to move out altogether instead of getting the surplus furniture!'
An unusual, entrepreneurial start-up was growing within the government to assist me, housed out of sight… set themselves up within the old world of rigid hierarchical status.... They were a new paradigm of organization. No hierarchy amongst them; no markers of position; no assigned resources.
Excerpted with permission
