Silent Revolution... what good is it??
Sunday Night always brings out the social thinker in me. When I try to dig the reason, It seems to happen because I sleep a lot during the day and thus can not sleep soon enough at night. Wallowing through out the day does not help the cause (sleeping) either. And then, an almost only then, when my mind is idle; the devil sets in. For good or bad I start drawing out theories to account for our country's present state and how it can/should be improved. Most of these theories are ridiculous and quite rightly rejected by my conscious mind, first thing done on Monday Morning.
Well this Sunday, it was a small excerpt from the presidential address on Republic Day. It could not have be said better in such few words, when he called upon the youth of this country to take up a silent revolution against corruption. As a president of a nation he has far less freedom than me when it comes to what he can put in his official communication.
I guess that is the reason he left out the "HOW" part of the job he asked us to do. His stress on the silent aspect of the revolution also is a bit unnecessary and apt at the same time. It is apt because honesty and sincerity in any struggle is glorified by its selflessness. Silent contributions are mostly selfless. But like Baghat Singh once said "For the deaf (British Empire) to hear, an [harmless] explosion (in the parliament) is required". In a country where victims and perpetrators are deaf alike to such calls, silence is not such a viable option. I feel, that there is fear of loosing one's integrity is very little or practically none. People have already lost it or they simply don't care. Every now and then, his conscious troubles him - a common man finds another person who is more corrupt than himself and justifies his wrongdoing or worse - declares himself a upright person for not doing that delta which the other person has transgressed. Hence a general feeling of "Hamam mein sab nangein" [1] applies to Indian junta when it comes to corruption.
How ?
Capital Punishment for embezzling funds from a government undertaking. Can this put some fear back in the minds of amoral politicians and beurocrats? I don't think so. In the past 5 years, there have been lots of cases of embezzlements. But how many have lead to convictions? None would be approximately correct. What is the point in having a strictest of the punishments if nobody gets it? So Capital Punishment ruled out (Monday Morning development).
Plug the holes in the law. Ha Ha... as if it is possible. Indian constitution is the bulkiest in the world. Hence, it has the largest holes also. It is also one of the most ambiguous one. Which makes it very easy for culprits to go scot free. One thing that is possible is to take certain things out of the constitution and allow individual departments to take their own action, of course with a certain directive from the Supreme court. This makes the process of punishing these non-criminal, white collared culprits much more streamlined and fast so that his contemporaries know the result of malpractice. Late Ramakrishna Hegde gets the credit for establishing Lokayukta in Karnataka when he was the chief minister for doing something similar on these lines. But the constitution did not allow him to give enough powers to Lokayukta to dismiss/suspend or take any action on the culprit. It can now only report misgivings. The action to be taken is at the discretion of the respective ministry. If the rules were objective enough, the evidence of a person caught red-handed should be enough to confiscate his movable/immovable assets, freeze his accounts, cancel his pension and immediate termination of employment. Yes of course, there must be trial of some sort where he can put forward his side of the case if he has one. But the whole exercise must be time bound and more professionally handled.
Mention of professionalism brings to mind the blatant lack of it in Indian Governance. Very few institutions (Passport Office and Income Tax office for example) though, are exceptions. I don't expect the Government office to go for CMM/ISO certification. But they must have some sort of order and process installed for continuous improvement. Those offices that deal with public directly have a greater need of continuous improvement through honest feed back. For example, consider the property registration office. There is one for registering the sale deed, there is another where the land records are kept and another 2 for the utilities. What is the need for all these, different offices. Can all these not happen in one interaction only?? I bet everybody who has undergone these steps at some point of time would have thought about this proposal. But even if the person is enthusiastic enough, who does he contact? None. He will be glad that his ordeal is finally over, at least till the next time he buys/sells some land. More over such distributed processing of records is a breeding ground for frauds. I will only be giving ideas to the crooked minds if I explain how. But yes, this is one definite way to reduce corruption and increase government productivity. Frequent feedback, performance reviews and incentives, targets and bonuses can lead to more professional environment in government offices.
Early Retirements. Government Job is not for ever. I once heard a story about how a group of monkeys[2] were trained not to eat the banana in a room. So I believe that more fresh blood in any organization will increase efficiency. This is not easy since it goes against the conventional notion of nothing more assured and stable than a government job. Today, government jobs are being taken as a gift... There is no concept of giving back to the country. Another person who does exactly similar job in a private firm is on much lesser pay and enjoys much less benefits. This makes government jobs a kind of gift. Imagine if the government retirement age was 45 (Moderate Length Commissions). Twice the number of people would be benefited from the facilities. Average age would be less than 40 which would mean that almost all would be in their productive peak. New people leads to new ideas. At 45 a person does not feel all that good to retire from working too. He will make his living by some other means by investing his savings leading to more and more entrepreneurs leading to greater growth rate. Of course government has to provide an environment abetting small business, more so in rural India.
Transparency. Such a clich�. Let me reserve it for the next week.
[1] Hamam is a Turkish word which means a place where the ritual of luxurious bath was being taken. The unique thing about Hamams was that it was used by people of all ranks at the same time - Hence the simile to present day corruption where people of all the ranks are involved. Hamam
[2] Monkeys: There were a group of eight monkeys in a room. There was a bunch of banana hanging from the ceiling and a table below it. One hungry monkey climbed the table to pluck bananas. Ice cold water was sprayed on all the monkeys. That scared the first monkey and it jumped down without touching the bananas. After a while the same thing happened with another monkey. Now other monkeys got intelligent. Any time any monkey tried to climb the table, they pulled him down and beat him up for fear of being sprayed with ice cold water once again. When this order was established, one monkey was taken out and new monkey introduced into the group. This new monkey, looking at the banana, went straight to the table and climbed it. To its surprise (shock rather), the rest pulled him down and beat him up. Few moments later, another monkey was replaced - which got beaten up too. By the time the fourth monkey got replaced the first replacement monkey also started taking part in the beating up ritual. Little did it know about the ice water. Finally one by one all the original monkeys were removed an replaced by new ones. What stayed was only the beating ritual, even if none of the monkeys knew why it started. More over, ice water was never sprayed again.
The relevance of this story here is that this is exactly the state of affairs in government offices. Old, non enthusiastic and complacent workers set the tempo and dampen the spirits of all the new-comers. Sooner or later, the new worker abandons his zest for excellence and takes the role of spirit dampner. If the ratio of new-comers to old-timers is reversed, may be we can find the spirit of fresher undampable.