MOHAN GURUSWAMY:.
Oh! To be a government employee! A sarkari job is the stuff the dreams of a majority of Indians are made off. To be a government employee is to enter an enchanted world. A gated community, if you like. A world of lifetime tenures and pensions that are almost near the last pay drawn. Lifetime top class healthcare, top class (relatively) English medium schooling for the kids, and leave travel benefits to see the country and the world around it. Even though life is getting more expensive all the time, inflation proofed salaries take care of that. In addition to the highest across the board salaries in India, there is chai pani aur neechey ka paisa. No wonder it costs an arm and a leg to get into this world - several lakhs to become a chaprasi or constable and increasingly even a jawan. Has anyone noticed that most of the new cars, white goods, flat screen TV's and other such symbols of well being and even high living are now mostly bought by people in the fiercely gated community?
Jawaharlal Nehru envisioned the modern Indian public administration apparatus as the "beast of burden" that will take the nation forward. Now that beast of burden has become a burdensome beast, preying off a poor nation, where about 70% of the people live below the mandated UNDP minimum standards of living.
The most basic dictum in Public Administration is that “the nature of the regime determines the nature of the outcome.” Regimes dominated by elites tend to be extractive, while regimes based on popular participation tend to be inclusive and where the fruits of development are more shared. Make no mistake, whatever be a system of government there will always be elites. The difference lies in the difference between the elites. An imposed and self-perpetuating elite is by nature extractive and the fruits of growth are inevitably cornered by a few, while in a participative system growth is more inclusive.
There are many systems of government. The one we are most familiar with is democracy. There are many kinds of democracies in vogue, but the common foundation is that they all strive to reconcile needs, aspirations, demands and rights of all the people, and consider all people equal. We therefore call them reconciliatory systems.
Then we have regimes, which are controlled by elites. These typically are all kinds of monarchies, theocracies, dictatorships, colonial and random despotic regimes. Since power is vested in the hands of a small number of people, we call it a bureaucratic system.
The last kinds are the communist and post revolutionary systems that depend on a very high degree of mobilization. To be a mobilized system you invariably need a common goal or enemy, and usually a charismatic leader. Mobilized systems come into being at times of great distress or following an upheaval. Russia and Germany after WW1, or post-revolutionary China are typical of this.
But the problem with reconciliatory and mobilized states is that sooner than later, elites take them over too. Often these elites are hereditary as in very diverse nations like India and North Korea, or bureaucratic elites from internally competitive and politicized structures like the Chinese Communist Party.
Political leaders as diverse as Jayaprakash Narayan and Leon Trotsky warned against this tendency. JP called for a complete decentralization of government, with the higher tiers of government with very restricted power and authority. Trotsky advocated Permanent Revolution to prevent vested interests from getting entrenched and taking over the system. Napoleon who inherited the French Revolution anticipated this by replacing revolutionary terror or permanent revolution with permanent war. According to Mark 6:4 Jesus said to them, "A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home." JP never got the honor and due respect due to him in his own country, as did Gandhi who championed an even more idealistic state of democratic decentralization advocating self-sustaining and self-reliant village republics.
When India became independent, Jawaharlal Nehru advocated disbanding the British inherited civil service and wanted a new system of public administration that will not just preserve order to facilitate extraction of revenues, but will drive change and equitable development. But Sardar Patel was dead set against such a radical transformation of government, and preferred India to be administered by an elite civil service such as the ICS. The change was only in the name and more moderate salaries, possibly to blunt Nehru’s egalitarian instincts
Nehru abhorred the ICS for its role during the British occupation of India, and as a compromise a new broad-based civil service system, based more on merit and less on class, was created with development administration as one of its key goals. Whatever were the dynamics, between the two leaders they perpetuated a highly centralized regime, and India seven decades later is still paying a heavy price for it. Thus we now have a system of governance that is still as distant from the people as was the case in the British and possibly even the earlier feudal periods.
All we need to confirm this thesis is to study the wage bills at the three tiers of government – the central, state and local government levels. A sum of Rs.166,000 crores has been provisioned in the current budget to pay central government employees as salaries and Rs.145,000 crores as pensions for glorious service- about 10.45 per cent of its overall expenditure. the defence budget includes a capital outlay of just Rs 99,500 crores while the estimated revenue expenditure for salaries and day-to-day expenditures is Rs. 196,000 crores. Defence pensions amounting to Rs.109,000 is in addition. Clearly securing and defending the Republic does not come cheap!
The estimated wage bill of government at all tiers is around about 10.4% of the estimated nominal GDP of Rs. 153,000 lakh crores (2017). The three levels of government together employ about 185 lakh persons. The central government employs 34 lakhs, all the state governments together employ another 72.18 lakhs, quasi-government agencies account for a further 58.14 lakhs, and at the local government level, a tier with the most interface with the common citizens, we have only 20.53 lakhs employees. In other words it simply means we have five persons telling us to do this or do that, for every one supposedly serving us. And whom even these one out of six persons are answerable to is still a big question?
Do we then have a big government bearing down on us? Not really. Consider this: India has 1,622.8 government servants for every 100,000 citizens. In stark contrast, the U.S. has 7,681. The central government, with 3.1 million employees, thus has 257 serving every 100,000 population, against the U.S. federal government's 840. Now look at the next tier at the state level. Bihar has just 457.60 per 100,000, Madhya Pradesh 826.47, Uttar Pradesh has 801.67, Orissa 1,191.97 and Chhattisgarh 1,174.62. This is not to suggest there is a causal link between poverty and low levels of public servants: Gujarat has just 826.47 per 100,000 and Punjab 1,263.34.
The troubled states or really speaking the troublesome states actually fare far better on this score. Thus, Mizoram has 3,950.27 public servants per the 100,000 population, Nagaland 3,920.62 and Jammu and Kashmir 3,585.96. Bar Sikkim, with 6,394.89 public servants per 100,000, no state comes close to international levels. Very clearly for the most part, India's relatively backward states have low numbers of public servants. This means staff is not available for the provision of education, health and social services needed to address poverty. In 2014 Prime Minister Modi promised the nation “maximum governance with minimum government.” But what we have perpetuated is minimum governance and minimum government with maximum regulation.
In the past few years I have been traveling in the hinterlands of India. The biggest realization was that no sooner you get off the tarmac of the state roads and national highways, all signs of government disappear. Even the government primary schools when not locked, function mostly to provide the midday meals than any worthwhile education. There are very few signs of the police, irrigation, power and PWD departments. In most of the adivasi homelands the only presence of modern India is often the arrack contractor or the forest guard. Its as if a vast stateless nation exists.
Even in urban areas, the Prime Ministers call for a Swachch Bharat goes unheeded because the systems to collect trash and dispose them just not exist. Does anybody wonder why Indians defecate everywhere? The good thing about defecation even in the open is that invariably it is done in the privacy afforded by darkness or foliage. But public urination is everywhere. It’s such a commonplace sight that it doesn’t even repel us anymore. The PM’s call is timely, but to put it into effect we need the public systems that can carry away waste. This is why local government is critical.
Freidrich Engels prophesized that as societies develop “the interference of state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The state is not “abolished,” it withers away.” It would seem that the state has withered away in India without achieving any worthwhile social and economic transformation. Instead we have evolved into multiple nations.
We have a Stated nation as envisaged by the founding fathers. We have a Stateless nation ruled by a Gated nation of the national elite, and we await with trepidation the Next nation of twelve million Indians who enter the work force every year.
Mohan Guruswamy
Email: mohanguru@gmail.com
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