Payment of Subsistance Allowance
: - A case study in systemic changes for office efficiency
The settlement Commissioner of Maharashtra has a contingent of nearly 6000 persons in the staff out of which around 200 were under suspension. This must be the scenario in many more offices at this operative level.
The Departmental Enquiry Rules and Manuals provide for how to deal with these people. Two rules are crucial for present discussion (i) for a person under suspension, the enquiry should be completed in six months - but this time is extendable by authorities at various levels (ii) the person under suspension will be paid a subsistance allowance which will be 50% of his pay and allowances for the first 3 months, to be enhanced to 75% for the remaining period of enquiry - however the authorisation for allowing him to draw the SA has to be issued only for three months (or less) and has to be revised by appropriate authority every three months.
The office of Settlement Commissioner has to issue orders only for Class II and Class I officers. However, considering four orders per person per year, the average still came to nearly 20 orders per month. This appears very simple and trivial work for the dealing clerk. We, however, realised that there was invariably a delay in issuing the order, which meant many letters, telegrams and complaint letters coming to our office every month. The concerned clerk would himself take quite a long time to prepare the order but he, and his desk officer would always come to the SC with a panic on their faces and demand immediate clearing of the file.
The original dates of issue of suspension order are randomly distributed throughout the year and since all the authorisation for drawing the SA are issued for three calender months, the renewed authorisation orders are also randomly distributed throughout the year. This means that all the concerned persons who have to write / read / sign the file or dispatch the order have to do the same type of work almost once per day.
The systemic change introduced in this procedure was done in 4-5 stages as below:-
1) I kept signing the files as and when they came (while introducing any systemic change it is necessary to avoid all possible initial confusions) I only changed the end-date of authorisation upto the end of the month by giving authorisation for less than 3 months.
It was possible to give authorisation for more than 3 months and match the end date with the next month-end but no accounting man would allow it for fear of Audit para.
2) At the end of 3-4 months, the clerk suddenly found that nearly twenty cases had become due for renewal of authorisation wef the 1st date of the month. This increased his panic by 20 times. At this stage I called a meeting of the concerned clerks, the concerned desk officers and the Establishment officers and asked them to prepare one single order, showing all the names in a tabular form.
Initially they seemed confused and pleaded they couldn’t take out such an order as it would not be acceptible to the various treasury officers. However the EO, agreed to sign, in original, all copies going to all TOs and realised that the number of signatures needed was less than twenty, though all to be put on one single day.
3) At the end of 6 months, the clerk realised that he has to just look at the previous order and most probably repeat it in toto and thus has the guarantee of not missing any name. This brought down the complaints (every complaint in a govt. office, even when not answered, takes away a minimum two man hours of work which is totally unproductive.)
4) The outward clerk had to just paste one cyclostyled copy of this order to his register and mention the total franking stamps he had put in and thus save most of the written work in the dispatch register.
5) Whenever the enquiry is delayed (in almsot 100% cases) and extension of suspension period has to be authorised by govt., the general practice is to ask for 1 to 3 month's extension depending on the report from enquiry officer. By the time this is received from govt., case is generally due for asking for another extension and the process goes on by its own momentum and the enquiry never seems to be fixed for hearing or completion.
We started sending cases to govt. in a bunch with one covering letter and one tabulated information and ask for extension upto end of a quarter for all the cases in that bunch. Sometime this meant asking for an extension for 4 to 6 months also.
One Desk officer had to go Bombay to explain the desk officers there, why and how we requested these extensions batch-wise rather than on file to file basis and how would reduce their work too. Once that was done the extension orders due from govt. also started coming as one single order for several cases together.
6) This has made actual file work quite prompt but more important, it made monitoring at my level very easy.
This experiment of systemic change had the added advantage of attitudinal change - the office has started (I hope) thinking of various establishment problems in their totality (i.e. how many total files to process per month or per year or how many times to process one file during one year etc) rather than deal with them on "as and when" basis.
The office has also started thinking of other areas where similar clubbing procedure is possible.
This has also brought in a certain degree of transperancy. One employee whose order is issued alongwith other twenty cases on first occasion, will immediately come to know that he has been missed out on next occasion if he finds that other orders have come through. Similarly if someone has not received an order but finds that his name is included in the total list, then instead of coming to us, he can just procure a zerox copy from any of them because the Disrict office and the Treasury both have the original copy.
The whole exercise and even this write up seems irrelevent and even unethical if we allow one question : Why are the DE’s kept pending for such long durations? What systemic changes are needed to reduce this pendency?
Still, without going into those questions at this occasion, I may claim that the first experiment has led to a total saving of 70% of time spent by all personnel involved in this exercise.
7) The regional Deputy Commissioners have to issue similar orders for Class III staff. Some of them were smart to pick up the idea. Others had to be told to do so. However, the idea was explained to them in a meeting of the concerned desk officers. I found that I did not have to explain anything. My desk officers and establishment officer were too happy to "give lecture" before the Deputy Commissioners.
8) Thus after nearly 8 months the change has been completely implemented. It is a very trivial looking, small change and yet, let us not undermine its importance. In coming years more and more such systemic changes are going to be needed if we want to take care of the growing volume of work in govt. offices.