Our Bureaucracy, Our Selves

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

Related Articles

Voting ends in R'sthan by-polls, 50% polling recor...Indira Gandhi proved India is not a soft stateProve majority within week: Governor to HoodaState Govt responsible for Khagaria carnage: RJD

: A recent survey finding by Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy that India’s bureaucracy is the stiflingly worst in Asia comes as no surprise. Our debate on bureaucracy reform gets nowhere because it rests on simplistic assumptions. Much of the focus tends to be, paradoxically, very bureaucratic, focusing excessively on corruption and less on efficiency. And there is the illusion that reform is largely a matter of new rules, more oversight, new institutional designs and getting incentives right. But this is only a small part of the story. It ignores the fact that sometimes more and more oversight makes the system less efficient. Even more egregiously, it ignores how bureaucratic behaviour is embedded in larger socio-economic structures.

First, the relationship between growth and bureaucratic reform is complicated. It is no accident that in the survey, all countries that rank higher than India also have higher per capita GDP. Which way does the causality run? There is good reason to think both ways. Contrary to popular perception, India does not invest enough in its state. While we can draw on horror stories of overstaffing, in most departments that matter the Indian state is understaffed, underequipped and undertrained. This leads to the syndrome best captured by the brilliant novel Raag Darbari, that there is often so much work that all work comes to a standstill. Arguably, some growth produces the kind of resources that allows states to invest in themselves and make reform possible.

Second, the link between corruption and growth is complicated. If one can put the matter bluntly, the problem in Bihar and Orissa is not that they have more corruption than Tamil Nadu or Andhra Pradesh. It is that poorer states have fewer opportunities to be intelligently corrupt. Much of the corruption comes out of programmes that affect the poor. Whereas in states like Haryana or Tamil Nadu, rents can be extracted more efficiently from areas like real estate, telecom, roads, or be disguised under the new euphemism: public private partnerships. In short, they have forms of corruption that affect the poor less. Paradoxically, it gives politicians an incentive to do more development.