Contd:
[h=2]Political entanglements[/h]In even the best of worlds, Mr Samphel's would be an impossible job. In India's corrupt democracy, the collectors' burden is made much heavier by interfering politicians. The problem is most grievous in north India, where civil servants tend to attach themselves to politicians for enrichment, advancement—or in despair of otherwise getting their jobs done. The habit is said to have been implanted in the system during India's 1975 state of emergency, when, with the help of senior bureaucrats, Indira Gandhi grabbed power for 21 months. One IAS officer tainted by the hiatus was Navin Chawla, a senior civil servant in Delhi with strong ties to the Gandhi family, Congress's leaders. A government inquiry into the emergency ruled that he was “unfit to hold any public office which demands an attitude of fair play and consideration for others”. The current government has made him deputy chief of India's election commission.
Under India's constitution, politicians cannot sack IAS officers. Instead they tend to misuse their power to transfer or suspend them. On January 31st four IAS officers were suspended by UP's chief minister, Mayawati, a champion of outcaste dalits. Their crime was to have penned friendly words about Rahul Gandhi, Mrs Gandhi's grandson, a rising force in the Congress party. Indeed, after any transfer of power in UP, Madhya Pradesh (MP), Orissa and Bihar, scores of senior civil servants are routinely shunted—including Mr Samphel's predecessor, who was, not coincidentally, of the same Hindu caste as the outgoing chief minister. During a riotous eight-month rule over MP in 2003-04, a politician called Uma Bharati transferred 240 of the state's 296 IAS officers.
To mitigate the damage done by such shake-ups, the DPT, of which Mr Mishra is chief, recently changed the civil-service code, fixing the minimum job tenure at two years. Alas, only a handful of states have accepted this—as they are constitutionally obliged to do. And yet other decent plans and proposals exist. Continued retrenchment is one; according to Sheila Dikshit, Delhi's chief minister and the widow of an IAS officer, around half of senior civil service posts could be scrapped. Another proposal is to lower the upper age limit for IAS recruits, thereby, it is argued, improving their quality.
Civil service pay, currently $500 a month for a district collector, might also be increased. A decennial pay commission, due to report this month, is expected to recommend this. Logic—though little evidence—suggests that this might reduce the tendency of senior babus to steal. It might also fend off growing competition for India's brightest talent from private companies, though retaining civil servants is not yet proving difficult; over the past year, fewer than 20 IAS officers have quit the service to join the private sector. Getting rid of corrupt or incompetent civil servants is rather trickier. In a 40-year IAS career, B.K. Chaturvedi, a former head of the civil service, can recall only three officers having been dismissed.
[h=2]A Band-Aid on a corpse[/h]Sensible as these changes may be, however, reforms written by civil servants are unlikely to provide the necessary transformation in India's civil service. Nor is technology the instant elixir it is sometimes considered to be. Inspired by a crusading IAS officer, in the past two years Karnataka state has built 800 privately managed “telecentres” where citizens can access land records, birth and death certificates and driving licences online. Following its lead, the central government is rolling out 100,000 similar terminals, with additional services in education and health care. The benefits of skipping a rung or two of rent-seeking officialdom are manifest.
But in a mostly unreformed system, rent-seekers have a habit of clawing back. The title of a draft paper by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is apt: “Putting Band-Aid on a corpse: incentives for nurses in the Indian public health-care system”. To encourage a batch of Rajasthani nurses to show up for work—which, on any day, over 60% did not—its authors began monitoring their attendance at village health centres by computer and sending the results to the state health ministry. Threatened with fines, half of the absentees returned to work. Six months later, they began breaking the computers and reporting “machine problems”. After 16 months, the health centres featured in the study were no more likely to contain a nurse than any other.
No doubt Mr Singh is right: to provide poor Indians with halfway decent public services, the bureaucracy needs, root-and-branch, to be made accountable. But this will not happen soon. Indeed, one of the more hopeful changes will be organic. As India's economy grows, inflating land prices and increasing opportunities for private contractors, corrupt politicians and bureaucrats may find reliable sources of rent that do not involve stealing directly from the mouths of the poor. More managed and substantial reforms, including the right to information and decentralising power, are also hopeful. Yet they are in their infancy, partly because of resistance from jealous bureaucrats.
India's panchayats, or local governments, are in theory responsible for managing welfare and development schemes in their district or urban area. But many are powerless. In only two states, Communist-ruled Kerala and West Bengal, have they been given control over their own budgets—with patchy success.
Kerala, for example, has put 90% of development spending in the hands of its panchayats. In addition to central government schemes such as the NREGS, village panchayats in the southern state have $250,000 a year to spend as they choose. This has reduced the collector to a regulatory role: overseeing land records and advising the panchayats. On paper, this looks terrific. It also helps that Kerala is one of India's least corrupt states. And yet panchayat leaders, often drawn from feudal or political elites, can be as self-serving as any babu. S.M. Vijayanand, chief official of Kerala's Local Self Government Department and a main architect of the reform, concedes that the new system also misses the collector's managerial skills. He says: “It's more equitable, more accountable, more democratic, but there's a cost also in efficiency.”
In Kochi, the state's seaside capital, the district collector, Muhammad Hanish, enjoys the same trappings of office, and suffers many of the same burdens, as Mr Samphel. Stepping out of his white Ambassador, Mr Hanish, who is 38, inspects a suburb of Kochi with relish. (“This is the end of my town; after this, the Arabian Sea.”) He has just spent four hours dealing with 200 poor supplicants. He is in charge of 60 departments. Yet, unlike Mr Samphel, he has no control over their budgets. Nor is he directly responsible for planning and implementing the public works that they are called on to perform. After three-and-a-half years in the job, during which time he reckons to have seen 10,000 project proposals, Mr Hanish says he has forced the local panchayat to drop “less than ten” of them.
That is as it should be. Elected panchayats, unlike elite civil servants, can be held to account. But it may take years before poor Indians enjoy the benefits of this. For now, Mr Hanish says the new system has made his job more difficult and the delivery of public services poorer. “Most panchayat leaders are incompetent. Too many are corrupt.”
Yet elsewhere the picture may be worse. In most states, including UP, politicians and bureaucrats have denied the panchayats even modest power. The ditch-digging NREGS is an example. It is hard to know what UP's panchayats exist for, if not to identify and organise its wretched beneficiaries. But it is the collectors who mostly control the scheme.
And so in Kochi, after a hellish long day, Mr Hanish goes home to work until 2am on the next day's files. Meanwhile in Jalaun, 2,400km to the north, Mr Samphel sets out to inspect freshly dug ditches, and listen to the infinite complaints of their ragged diggers, by torchlight.
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