‘Free administrators from ministers’

[karira]

A column by P.V. Indiresan in thehindubusinessline.com on 29 September 2008:
The Hindu Business Line : ‘Free administrators from ministers’

‘Free administrators from ministers’

The Right-to-Information Act is one way of untangling the web in which all our administrative decisions are encased. RTI should be used to find out not merely what happened but who made anything happen the way it did, says P.V. INDIRESAN.



Three weeks ago, the situation in Kashmir was considered grim; the Nano car project in Singur was creating tremors and the nuclear treaty was the hot topic. By all accounts, Singur is now dead; Kashmir has been pushed to the background but the nuclear treaty remains top news.

Collapse of Lehman, Merrill Lynch and AIG continues to agitate businessmen, but the most pressing local news is the follow-up of the bomb blast in Delhi. Twenty-four hour News has its advantages and disadvantages too.

Our Constitution is expected to be the final resource that protects us from these kinds of mishaps. Over the past 60 years, our Constitution has been amended over a hundred times. In contrast, the American Constitution has been amended barely 27 times over the past 225 years — including the first ten moved by Jefferson and known as the Bill of Rights. Our experts will say that we have a flexible Constitution while the Americans have an inflexible one. They forget that by amending our Constitution as frequently as we have, we have lost a critical essence of the original.

Last year, Hollywood released a movie, Charlie Wilson’s War. It deals with the effort of US Congressman Charles Wilson to get the Russians out of Afghanistan. He succeeded. He also wanted more money to be spent on schools in Afghanistan. He did not succeed.

The latest bombing in Islamabad is but the latest of the consequences of his failure. Charles Wilson’s success and failure were both the result of the American Constitution. Every Constitution has its strengths and its weaknesses. But for the Supreme Court’s intervention, our Constitution would have been shredded of whatever sanctity it used to have.

Whether the problem concerns Kashmir or Singur or the Nuclear Treaty or the terrorists, it is the Constitution that bears, rather the cavalier way the Constitution is mistreated, ultimately bears the responsibility.

As old timers will tell you, the problem was started by the way India’s first Prime Minister was treated by his bureaucracy. Most Indian officials were young; they had been trained to obey rather then lead. For most of them, Jawaharlal Nehru was as old as their parents; he had got us Independence. How could he be wrong?

Once Jawaharlal Nehru’s pre-eminence passed, our Constitution could not withstand the machinations of the Congress (U) and of Indira Gandhi.
Successive governments set the style of functioning of our ministers; administrators gave away their powers and let ministers behave any way they wanted. That is the main reason why we bungle from one crisis to another.

Vision 2020 is not about what went wrong but about how to make life better than what it would normally be. Vision 2020 is not about Kashmir or Singur or the Nuclear Treaty or the terrorists but how to minimise such problems from recurring in the future.

That responsibility rests with the Constitution. Unfortunately, our Constitution is unable to prevent our ministers from getting into untenable positions.

Fixing the ‘who’ first

It is the responsibility of administrators to advise ministers and keep them on an even keel. Due to our history, our administrators have surrendered their authority to do so. That is why most of our news is bad. Fortunately, Rajiv Gandhi introduced the Right-To-Information Act. It is not working as well as it should. Many ministers (and administrators too) evade it as best as they can. Nevertheless it is there; it can be used and should be used.

When I was a young man, I was advised by a senior administrator that I should learn to involve as many people as possible in any decision I took. That is the classical technique of avoiding responsibility. It continues to operate to this day. The Right-to-Information Act is one way of untangling the web in which all our administrative decisions are encased. RTI should be used to find out not merely what happened but who made anything happen the way it did. In any query under the RTI, can we ask who was responsible for the action taken? If we were to follow my senior’s advice, there would be many, so many that it would be impossible to assign anyone any responsibility. Even then, suppose we could get the question ‘who?’ answered. Then, our administrators will get exposed. More important, our administrators get freed from our ministers.

In current practice, it is our ministers who issue orders but they often do so without placing their signatures on the file. They can do so because they choose the Secretaries they have and, more importantly, because they can choose what perquisites their Secretaries can have after retirement. As a result, what we have today is a whole bag of tricks which our ministers can play with, and do so without being called into account. Hence, ministers can indicate through oral orders what they desire and administrators act the way ministers want — whether that is wise or otherwise or even legal.

Once we get the RTI Act to tell us who was responsible for any action of the Government, administrators will get the power to ask their ministers to put on file what they want. Once we add ‘Who?’ to the RTI, ministers are not prevented from doing what they do now but they become accountable.

Public persistence is key

I am not arguing that administrators will always decide better than ministers. At the same time, I do argue that administrators will decide more cautiously than ministers do. For that reason at least, we will have fewer problems than what we have now.

I do not expect that the government will surrender easily the power it has to obfuscate. It will require much persistence and a lot more determination to get the government to unwind. However, if the public persists, some day, some Chief Information Commissioner will yield and throw open a Pandora’s Box of concerns.

Even then, the government will almost definitely take the matter to the courts. It will almost certainly take a few years’ effort to get the courts, particularly the Supreme Court, to yield and ask “who was the person responsible?” Once that happens, a new regimen will take over.
Ministers will then recede into making policy and will largely leave administrative decisions into the hands of administrators.

When more decisions are left in the hands of administrators, decisions will become more cautious. Then, it is possible that a Singur would not happen the way it has. Kashmir would have been ruled better than it has been. Terrorism may not become the menace it has.

Will not ministers leaving more action in the hands of administrators make the latter more powerful? Yes, it will; they may even become over-powerful. Then, new laws will have to be enacted to curb their powers. However, as matters stand now, honest administrators are too far on the defensive; they are unable to caution ministers when ministers drift dangerously. RTI is not exactly what we need; but it appears to be the best we can use considering the way ministers are drifting.