On the memo trail

In formatting its documents, Indian bureaucracy instinctively heeds Edgar Allan Poe’s sentiments. “I have been always solicitous of an ample margin,” once trilled the creator of the American gothic tale. “This not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of pencilling suggested thoughts, agreements, and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.” And so, when a cloth-bound file is delivered to an official’s table, she can be certain that the pages enclosed will allow sufficient elbow room to indulge in that most liberating of exercises, marginalia.

As a file finds its way around the corridors of decision-making, it acquires acreages of jottings. Conscientious objections, robust questions of process and propriety, sly lobbying, wordy dithering, political caution, diversionary trivia. There it goes, up and down the hierarchy, gathering in these notings the narratives of decisions big and irrelevant. Set a grey eminence on a nostalgic lecture, and he will inevitably bemoan the crisis of governance, a predicament visible in the falling quality of file notings. These jottings are now at the heart of a tussle between right-to-information activists and the bureaucracy. As government readies to deliver the provisions of the Right to Information Act, officials argue that sharing their notings with the public would cramp their written interventions.

Putting them under a wider gaze, they say, militates against the very division between a noting and an official document. A noting, it is true, is in the nature of a communication to fellow decision-makers and implementers, it is an adjunct to the file. To bring it within the purview of the RTI Act may inhibit an officer from freely expressing himself. Yet, extending transparency to notings could actually give cover to an official. It could affix responsibility at various stages of decision making. The optimal balance between transparency and secrecy born of sincere suggestions is never stable, it would always shift. But remember, marginalia can yield tantalising stuff. We await bureaucracy’s version of Fermat’s last theorem, squeezed into a margin more than 300 years ago and still a subject of obsessive speculation.