Problems with our Bureaucracy

In his book, Accelerating India’s Development, Karthik Muralidharan looks at the role of bureaucrats in India’s poor public service systems. As mentioned in earlier blogs, democracy forces politicians to over-promise. To deliver on those promises, they need a capable bureaucratic system. To improve the bureaucracy, investments have to be made. But we are a poor country – so there isn’t enough money to invest. Even worse, any investments in improving the bureaucracy will take a long time to translate into visible actions, but a politician’s re-election cycle comes within 5 years, why then would a politician invest in the bureaucracy?

 

In addition, politicians want to have pliable bureaucrats who will do their bidding. So they have actively undermined the professionalism and capability of the bureaucracy.

 

A lesser-known fact is that the Indian bureaucracy is understaffed. Not a typo. As a ratio of public servants to the population, India’s ratio is lower than China’s or a Western country’s. Without enough frontline workers and supervisors, no system can deliver results.

 

Further, accountability in the bureaucracy is focussed on compliance to procedures rather than outcomes. While procedures are necessary, when they are overdone, they limit the autonomy of officials to finetune or customize solutions. Further, when everything needs paperwork and forms, it hurts those who need the service the most – the poorest, the illiterate, the most vulnerable sections. They lack the documents, they can’t read or write, which makes it hard to access the services that they are entitled to.

 

Distance is another factor. Officials deciding matters often live far from the areas they impact. Without direct contact, it becomes very impersonal, and they lack any emotional connect to the areas they affect. This point is tied to understaffing, apart from the desire of officials to be posted in bigger towns and cities.

 

The system, a carryover from British times, isn’t designed to serve the people. Rather, it was designed to collect revenue and maintain law and order. The short tenure of officials is a legacy too – the British didn’t want officials to develop ties with the community, lest they soften up. To make matters worse, officials seek transfers to better locations, and politicians use the lure and threat of transfers to keep officials under check. All this means limited domain or local understanding; and sadly, even the well-meaning official who tries to reform things is ignored – after all, he won’t be there for long, and who knows what his successor will do?

 

Politicians have a say in hiring decisions at many levels. Unsurprisingly:

“Politicians often prioritize loyalty over competence.”

Further, bribes are expected in the hiring process. To recover these “costs”, the official takes bribes and a vicious cycle is set off. As Muralidharan says, hiring the wrong people is very costly – they will be there for 30 years!

 

Measuring economic performance is hard. Individual departments don’t have profit-and-loss statements. After all, the purpose of governance and bureaucracy isn’t to make profits – it is to provide services. Such a setup both hides the failures and creates no incentive for departments to make improvements.

 

The system doesn’t reward good performance but it does penalize errors. Such an asymmetric setup creates a culture of risk aversion, and policy paralysis. Why would a rational bureaucrat make any decision on a complicated matter whose outcomes and side-effects are unknown? Innovation can be fatal for one’s career.

 

A sobering but honest assessment of our bureaucracy.