When Shashi Tharoor, the Congress Member of Parliament called the NRI’s as the National Reserves of India while coordinating the panel discussion on Partnering for Prosperity at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas 2012 held at Jaipur, he managed to have an emotional connect with the NRI audience who gave him an applause. “We consider NRIs as National Reserve of India and this is the reason we invite you to come and invest in India which holds tremendous investment opportunities in the sectors of education, healthcare and infrastructure. There could be some operational challenges, but these are the areas we look forward to for your vision, technology & innovation, and way of doing things that can help build better India”,Tharoor said.
But interestingly one speaker who managed to hog the maximum spotlight and ovation was Prof G Mohan Gopal, Director Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies who minced no words in lashing out the Indian bureaucracy for its “colonial mindset” and said that civil service reforms are a must in India. He said ” bureaucrats in India have a closed mindset and that they avoid consulting the NRI’s on policy matters because they are afraid of the latter’s expertise”. Gopal who worked in the World Bank’s legal departments from 1986 to 2004 in various senior positions including Chief Counsel went on to dub the bureaucrats as ” generalists” who utterly lack domain knowledge because their field of work keeps changing frequently. He also held them responsible for the corruption in India.
Was Gopal right in dubbing the bureaucrats as generalists lacking in domain expertise? The answer is yes. Studies have shown that the bureaucrats on an average spend less than two years in a single position. By the time they begin to get the hang of their entrusted job, they are transferred elsewhere.
He was not the only NRI to criticize the babudom. Another woman NRI who was a practicing doctor stood up during one of the sessions and in choked voice narrated in front of the whole audience how she was victimized by an IAS officer because she refused to greese his palms. This woman Rashmi Dickinson, a cardiologist from the UK said her trust that runs 20 schools in a district in Rajasthan was facing more than 60 inquiries only because she tried to save a heritage structure and in the process ruffled the feathers of a corrupt IAS officer. ” I am absolutely devastated. I hope the Indian government would do something to stop this harassment” she said.
If you feel that Gopal exceeded his brief by criticizing the bureaucracy for its “colonial mindset”, then think again. The founder of Infosys Technologies, N R Naryana Murthy uttered almost similar words to describe the bureaucracy two years ago saying that the politicians and the bureaucrats are trapped into colonial mindset. His panacea for this is to abolish the whole system of generalised administrators under the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and replace it with specialists under a new ‘Indian Management Service’.
A report by Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy ranks bureaucracies across Asia on a scale from one to 10, with 10 being the worst possible score. India scored 9.21.India fared worse than Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and China.
The report said India’s bureaucracy was responsible for many complaints businessmen had about India, like lack of infrastructure and corruption.
The Constituent Assembly of India intended that the bureaucracy should be able to speak out freely, without fear of persecution or financial insecurity as an essential element in unifying the nation. But what is happening is that bureaucracy is muddled with political interference. It is more interested in pleasing political bosses and feathering its own nest rather than serving the people. Organising events like PBD to attract NRI’s towards India is a step in the right direction. But such events will have greater impact if the bureaucracy is sensitized towards their problems. A bit of Gandhigiri will work wonders than Babugiri.
