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COVER
STORY: BUREAUCRACY
The
Babu Burden
Civilian
employees of the Central Government take away in pay a fifth of the revenues
but give little in return, the changing expectations from the state and
computerisation making most of them surplus
By
Sumit Mitra and Prabhu Chawla
Banwari
Lal is a lower division clerk (LDC) at the Ministry of Home Affairs in
the capital's North Block. The 48-year-old began as a peon in Group D,
the lowest rung in the four-tier Central government. As LDC in Group C,
Lal draws the maximum monthly pay of Rs 6,334 (including dearness allowance).
Not a bad sum for basically doing no work.
The additional
secretary to whom Lal is attached is a believer in punching the keyboard
himself. Besides, with only two years to go before he crosses 50 and becomes
ineligible for entry into the next level of babudom-the upper division
clerk-Lal has become too lazy to master the intricacies of word-processing.
In the days of the typewriter, his hands were full with the correction
sheets, the clickety-clack of the machine ending after the final version
was approved. Today, as modifications are made on screen, Lal is ungainfully
employed at the taxpayers' expense.
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Illustration
by Ninan
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This week,
on Beating Retreat evening, the three services bands will sound the notes
of Abide With Me against the majestic backdrop of the seat of the Republic.
The music will fade away, but the growing irrelevance of babus like Lal
will continue to haunt the corridors behind the gothic pillars of North
Block and South Block. The bureaucracy housed in them and hundreds of
government bhavans across the country is becoming like the corpse that
kept growing in the Ionesco play.
Actually,
it is worse than a corpse as it resists change, fails to deliver even
elementary services and costs too much. Civilian employees of the Central
government eat up more than a fifth of the revenue receipts. When INDIA
TODAY did a cover story on bureaucracy 22 years ago ("Rule of the
Babu", February 16-28, 1979), the total number of civilian employees
was a scandalous 3.02 million. Today, far from shrinking, it has grown
to 3.72 million. The salary bills of the Central and state government
employees together have reached an astounding Rs 75,000 crore, nearly
a half of the revenue receipts.
If Lal is
a social parasite, his gazetted superiors are the same. In 1951, the IAS
was constituted with a strength of 957, including 336 officers from the
Indian Civil Service. Today there are 4,943 serving IAS officers. In 1979,
there were 724 officers of the rank of secretary, additional secretary,
joint secretary and deputy secretary/director. Today the number has nearly
doubled to 1,222.
The growth
is baffling because activities of the government have shrunk considerably
since former prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao chose to climb down from
the dizzying heights of the command economy in 1991. Earlier India took
several initiatives in administrative reforms, the first being the Secretariat
Reorganisation Committee headed by Girija Shankar Bajpai in 1947. However,
in the years under Jawaharlal Nehru as well as Indira Gandhi, the government's
role was perceived inter alia as a job creator. However, it was during
Indira's second reign that the Economic Administrative Reforms Commission
(1981-84) headed by L.K. Jha frowned upon overstaffing, though it did
not suggest job cuts.
Contd
Pg 2
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METRO TODAY
If
planned well, the quake could be the Keynesian opportunity for Yashwant
Sinha to trigger growth, 
