Work Culture in Government-- Some Basic Issues
At the turn of the millennium,
the Indian society stands at a crucial juncture of history. After suffering inefficient, expensive, and
corrupt public systems for a long time, the users now naturally look forward to
the era of liberalisation. One aspect
of this climate of expectancy is the hope that the work culture in our public
systems will be friendly towards users. While it is fairly true that
competition among the service providers has resulted in a dilution of the
customer hostile stance in some public services, there is an apprehension that
the full worth of the liberalisation measures can be realised only if the work
culture changes appreciably in government departments. This is so because many key social and
economic functions will continue to be performed by governments. Moreover, the
smooth and speedy ushering in of liberalisation measures will also largely
depend upon the prevalence of a congenial work culture in government. In fact, the ambling progress of
liberalisation so far has been partly due to tardy processing in government.
Therefore, it is imperative that the society addresses itself to the issue of
governmental work culture.
The
Maladies
What are the
maladies in government work culture? In
a nutshell, these are: a mulish preoccupation with the form rather than the
substance, a total lack of concern for the user, and a near-zero
accountability. The causes could be
diagnosed as structural and attitudinal, the two being organically related and
providing a mutual cause and effect relationship. Inept structures in the system promote user-hostile attitudes and
facilitate corruption. And once the
sweetness of power is tasted, bureaucratic attitudes tend to foster more
complex and inflexible features in the structure.
The Structure
Structurally,
our government systems use a complicated and century-old maze of laws, rules,
regulations and procedures. Created by
the British masters mainly to rein in their subjects, it fulfilled their
purpose of governance. User convenience
and facility of application were not the objective. The Serais Act of 1867 makes it incumbent on every restaurant to
give a free glass of water to any passer by.
Under this Act, a five star hotel in Delhi was recently prosecuted by
the Municipal Corporation for not performing this legal duty. The Indian Aircraft Act of 1934, which is
still in vogue, purports to control the manufacture, sale and use of aircraft. However, aircrafts are defined to include
balloons and kites, so you cannot complain if releasing of festive balloons on
grand occasions, or flying of kites on Makar Sankrant becomes punishable. In British days, if a pensioner wanted to
claim the arrears of pension for say, the period January to June, he had to
obtain a “life certificate” from a gazetted officer for the entire period and
not just for the last month. Obviously,
the government found it too much to believe that just because a pensioner was
alive during the last month, he could be alive earlier!
Lest there be
an impression that only old laws and procedures are sterile, consider the
following provision of Prevention of Corruption Act 1998: para 13(i)(d)(3)
which defines corrupt conduct of a public servant as one in which, while
holding office as a public servant, he obtains for any person or persons, any
valuable thing or pecuniary advantage without any public interest. The implication is that if the decisions
taken by a government official benefit a third party and if that official
cannot prove that the benefit was in public interest, he is guilty of
corruption. Now it is difficult to
think of decisions, which do not benefit anybody, and proving the related
fulfillment of public interest is dicey.
Naturally, Government servants are averse to taking decisions.
Why
are laws and rules so complex and queer?
Firstly, because there is a craving to cover all possible situations and
possibilities, including the remote and the improbable ones. Secondly, infusion of element of discretion
or invention is frowned upon as an invitation to misuse and as a possible
source of corruption. Nevertheless,
misuse and corruption do creep in and usually, governments respond to this in a
knee jerk manner by tightening the procedures and “plugging loopholes”. An excellent example is the Income Tax Act
and the rules framed under it. Soli
Sorabjee has rightly remarked that no legislation is more complex than the Income
Act and its numerous amendments.
Thirdly, between punishing the offender and complicating the system, the
latter is preferred, thereby creating more scope for legal wranglings and
corruption. Recently, in order to
preempt irregularities in award of contracts, the C.V.C. has issued a fiat that
negotiations with bidders in tender matters should be conducted only with the
lowest bidder. This would inevitably
worsen the tender processing delays and it is doubtful if it will result in
safeguarding public interest.
Fourthly,
there is an irrepressible urge to uniformise the government’s treatment of
different decision situations.
Although it is true that uniformisation has some advantage in the
economy of scale, and does give a general appearance of fair play, it often
forces an identical treatment of diverse situations, resulting in suboptimal
performance. Thus, adopting government rules and procedures in autonomous
bodies has led to reduced managerial freedom and a lowering of
productivity. Organisations like
I.C.A.R., C.S.I.R., and D.R.D.O. are cases in point.
Yet another reason
for the intricacy of procedures is the insistence on being highly correct. The famous novelist, Dr.Bhabani
Bhattacharya once wanted to have the Information and Broadcasting Ministry’s
permission to reproduce parts of his A.I.R. speeches in a book to be authored
by him. The response: he was asked to
share the royalty for the book with the A.I.R. in the same ratio which the
number of words from the AIR speeches which will actually appear in the book
would bear to the total number of words in the book. In a situation of this type, precision could have been relaxed in
favour of convenience so as to evolve a broad, nominal kind of amount (say, 20%
or 30% of royalty) to be shared with AIR.
Whenever the salary structure or allowances of government employees get
revised, the arrears to be paid to employees or pensioners are calculated in an
exact manner. Elaborate and precise
calculations are undertaken which are time consuming and give an excuse to
clerical staff to delay payments unless bribes are paid. If tabular reckoners were prepared which
give readymade lumpsum figures of the amount to be paid for different
combinations of individual parameters, the employees would welcome an
approximate but quick settlement of dues.
Then
there is the sheer lethargy in periodically revising rules and procedures and
so the irrelevant, senseless and outdated parts perpetuate. The practice of
government offices taking an “advance receipt” from the recipient before the
relevant cheque is prepared continues though it has no meaningful validity and,
in any case, the receiving and crediting a crossed “Account Payee” cheque very
well serves the purpose. The CPWD procedures laid down that national highways
should have surfaces strong enough to withstand a large army tank rolling down
at 20 miles per hour, long after army tanks ceased to be the heaviest road
vehicles. When the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation recently
constructed the Pune Mumbai expressway, it found that modern road trailers
actually exert greater axle loads, but the procedure forbade meeting this
requirement. A milk vendor who was actually selling adulterated milk was
acquitted because he had no license under PFA and the PFA applies only to
people who have a license to sell foodstuff.
Since
there is a practice of ‘fixing responsibility’ for each transgression of rules,
the bureaucrats invent and introduce more tiers through which a decision would
filter, so that individual responsibility gets diffused and cannot be
pinpointed later. Decisions and actions
thus get delayed and, in effect, the government officials get paid for not
taking decisions. The Fifth Central
Pay Commission had suggested that no file be allowed to travel through more
than three hierarchical levels before a decision is taken. But the present seven rungs persist and
fixing responsibility is rarely possible.
When asked if scientific research was suffering at the hands of
bureaucracy, Dr.Raja Ramanna’s response was forthright: “The ‘hallowed’ file system especially needs
to be done away with. Why can’t things
be done speedily with computers? During
Homi Bhaba’s time things worked very fast.
Most of the decisions we took were immediately implemented; we did not
have to route it through so many ‘proper’ channels that have sprung up now”.
If any
evidence was needed to show that the procedural framework is a major
impendiment in achieving results, one has to merely recount the experience of
senior functionaries who have implemented projects and programmes within the
prescribed time frames. Almost in each
case, the structure had to be bypassed to maintain progress and to get jobs
done. It is no secret that the
Department of Space and the Department of Atomic Energy have special procedures
and operate a more liberal delegation of authority than, say, the Ministry of
Human Resources Development. Is it then
a coincidence that India’s achievements in space and nuclear applications are
more impressive than those in education?
We had an excellent opportunity for
simplification of government systems when computerisation of government work
was initiated in the seventies. The
systems should have been first simplified and then put on computers. Instead, we chose to let the systems remain
abstruse and simply used the computer as a beast of burden, getting a large
number of functions performed through its power, losing sight of the fact that
many of these were really redundant. In this sense, inadvertently, the onset of
computers retarded simplification.
Liberalisation offers a second and perhaps the last opportunity to our
society to bring about demystification of government
The Attitude
Using
a structure with these features has resulted in an attitude among the
government personnel, which is power-oriented and not duty-centred. The combination of three factors--
politically nourished bargaining power, absence of value-based training, and a
lack of accountability-- has created a psychology of righteous arrogance
towards the user. We took over a
master-servant relationship perception from the British towards the
citizens. Over the last fifty years, it
has degenerated into a bestower-suppliant relationship. Shortages of essential goods and services,
and proliferation of governmental controls have further ruined a work culture, which
was never user-friendly to start with.
Thus an assistant in the civil supplies department dealing with a
citizen wanting a ration card, or an assistant at a railway reservation centre
dealing with a passenger sincerely feel that they are doling out a favour to
the person standing in front of him.
Far from regarding the citizen and the customer as the source of their
bread, these functionaries are smug in their conviction that they are donors,
and have no answerability.
It
is remarkable that when a government employee joins service, generally he has a
positive attitude towards work and this changes as the surrounding work culture
engulfs him. This happens because good
workers are burdened with more work.
Instead of being rewarded, they thus get more exposed to the possibility
of underachieving and tripping up on the slippery set of rules and
procedures. Since the non- performers
are not punished, slowly the performer learns that it is safer to be a non-performer. The newcomer also learns how a slower
disposal of work can bring him rewards through speed money. The complex system of rules and procedures
and the multi-tier system of decision-making has a catalytic effect on the
hardening of this attitude.
The Correctives
For
changing this work culture, the solution lies in exerting in two directions:
simplification of laws, rules, and procedures and infusion of inputs, which
will make dents on the user-hostile attitudes of government servants. The first of this has to be a massive
internal movement within the government organisation and the second will have
to be a relentless and specialised training input. This attitudinal training has to be supplemented by the public
system managers becoming role models to the staff under their command.
Over
the past many years, a few enterprising, honest and persevering civil servants
have demonstrated the changeability of work culture in government and have
succeeded in creating pockets of user-friendly administrative units even within
the existing framework. Offices of the
Ahmednagar District Collector, the Municipal Corporations at Surat, Thane , and
Nagpur did show positive changes in their work culture under devoted and
determined bureaucrat leaders. A Jag
Mohan in DDA, a Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra Pradesh, or a Kiran Bedi in Tihar
Jail cannot be dismissed as mere charismatic leadership phenomena. They are really Case Studies, which suggest
that, with adequate tenacity and appropriate handling, government organisations
can and do improve their work culture.
Since, in the above instances benefits were achieved within the
framework of the system, much more can be achieved if properly researched
changes in the present structure of rules and regulations are carried out.
Therefore, three requirements would seem to emerge: a
simplification of the system, attitudinal training inputs for officers and
staff, and emergence of senior bureaucrats as role models. With this, a lot of
positive change is possible. The task is perhaps daunting, but the rewards of
achievement are immensely rich.
Conclusion
The
prevalent work culture in government will severely cramp the Indian society in
deriving the full potential benefits of liberalization measures. The system is heavy footed and high handed
and this is largely due to the dyfunctional structure, which has evolved due to
identifiable causes. This structure, in
turn, has bred a multitude of arrogant, unscrupulous and unproductive public
servants who are insensitive to the users.
The remedial action, which will have to be immediate and resolute,
consists of creating structural and attitudinal changes. It has to be a movement, if not an agitation. In a sense, the movement for India’s
freedom has to be revived in its original spirit because, after gaining
political independence, the benefit has been largely devalued due to a wrong
work culture and the nation needs to be freed of this.