To say that India is changing is to state the obvious. But it is also obvious that it is not changing for all its citizens. Even a casual observer cannot miss the squalour in which a large number of the poor and the deprived live. Economic reforms have, no doubt, given new buoyancy to the Indian economy, but it is also a fact that they have not touched a large section of the Indian people. To do that, the government needs to undertake basic political and administrative reforms. The economic reforms undertaken so far have neatly skirted this issue. This option is not available if the goal now is to reach the marginal sections of the society. The privatisation route on its own will not be able to accelerate the developmental process for them. Even the NGO route has very limited scope in large parts of the country. Many NGOs are doing wonderful work in some areas, but where they are needed most a large number of them have become as inefficient and corrupt as the governmental structures. In the Northeast, for example, many ministers have floated NGOs under the control of their wives and children to siphon public funds. For some time to come, government agencies will continue to be the main channel for reaching people in these areas.Since there is little possibility of initiating any meaningful political reforms in the near future, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has done well to concentrate on administrative reforms. Successive governments have been talking about administrative reforms ever since Independence, but the exercise has remained mostly on paper. Politics and politicians are the main hurdle as the status quo suits them. The administrative system has become progressively worse. It is today neither professional nor neutral.Clearly, no substantive administrative reforms are possible without some consensus, informal if not formal, in the political class. But our polity is more divided today than before. And there are no signs that this trend will be reversed in the near future. Laloo Prasad Yadav has become a role model for ambitious newcomers in this highly lucrative profession of politics, cutting across party lines. His brand of politics is being practised in more than one state. Self-seekers who dominate today’s political scene call the shots. They are busy destroying every democratic institution that comes in the way of their single-minded pursuit for power and money. To say this is not to paint all political leaders black. Many of the senior leaders in every political party are persons of high integrity. Unfortunately, they find themselves helpless in controlling their rank and file.It is in this context that the prime minister’s new initiative for administrative reforms should be considered. Undaunted by the failures of the past attempts, he has announced two major decisions: setting up of a second Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC) and a complete revamp of the appraisal system for the IAS, as a starting point to reform the senior bureaucracy. There is little doubt that he is serious as he has not waited even for the constitution of the second ARC, before announcing the first step. He has rightly separated the process for the higher bureaucracy from the mid-level and lower bureaucracy. One can only hope that he proves the skeptics wrong, as he did in the case of economic reforms.A step-by-step approach, which does not ruffle too many feathers, is more likely to succeed. All past attempts failed miserably, because they attempted too much and stepped on too many toes.The problem may be phrased in terms of control, accountability and responsibility. They are all interlinked. Accountability to the people will be an illusory goal if the political executive keeps on strengthening its hold on the administrative machinery at all levels. Posting, transfers and promotions are mostly in the hands of the political leaders. The system, as it has developed since Independence, is today neither neutral nor effective. The obsession to make it neutral at all levels, higher and lower, has not worked and is unlikely to work in the foreseeable future. Maybe, the time has come to think of an alternative model of administration where central and local bureaucracies are organised differently.The process of reforms can be very different for the lower and higher bureaucracy. The merit criteria cannot be uniformly applied for all civil servants. Neutrality of civil services at the higher level may be a basic requirement in a country with such diversity; it need not be so in case of the local bureaucracy where partisan behaviour could be less of a handicap and prove more effective, if the goal is empowerment of the deprived sections and to speed up development in the rural areas. Local government is expected to be mission-driven and not rule bound. Even a partisan bureaucracy at the village level can be more accountable and committed if monitored properly at the political level. The acceptance of hierarchy and rational-legal authority in the villages is formalistic at best. Such a pattern of authority conflicts with the traditional basis of authority in most other relationships. Personal authority constitutes a crucial component of administrative structure in the rural areas.This is not going to change very soon. Strong loyalties to caste, religion, language and ethnic groups diminish commitment to the national political system and have the potential for political unrest and instability. A system which includes the expertise of the career civil servant and the commitment of the political appointee, and is able to exercise a delicate balance between rules and discretion, is more likely to succeed at the local level.The district administration is the cutting-edge of the delivery system of government services and programmes, and that is where reform process should start. More than one innovative alternative model, excluding the judiciary and police, could be tried on an experimental basis in different parts of the country to get proper feedback.
