Sebi chief calls for ethics in public administration

Expectations of people from public administration are very low as power and responsibility today do not go hand in hand, said M Damodaran, chairman of Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi).

Speaking on the relevance of ethics in public administration at the platinum jubilee celebrations of Indian Railways Accounts Service, Damodaran added that ethics is more important at the doorsteps of the finance people as they are the ones who blow the whistle and usually draw the lines between right and wrong.

"However, people who take liberties with rules and procedures are, most of the times, hailed as heroes," he said, adding that one of the ways to practice ethics is to increase access to information for the general public.

Citing the example of Enron, Damodaran said, "Enron serves as a good example of how to propagate falsehood, suppress truth and in the meantime even pick up a prize for corporate governance. We have not drawn all the lessons from the mistakes that were committed in these cases."

With regard to Sebi's recent order to ban UBS Securities from issuing participatory notes in connection for its alleged role in the May 17 stock market crash, Damodaran said that after this decision he received a number of calls from high-profile people advising him to rethink on the decision as UBS is a big name in the corporate sector. This, he added, was an indirect way of asking him to go slow on the 11 other cases that are in the pipeline.

"Such influences too can be addressed," Damodaran said adding that it is here that we need to make case studies an important part of training courses. "It is important, therefore, that in training courses offered to various officers we expose them to case studies of issues that have gone wrong," he added.

J M Lyngdoh, former chief election commissioner, criticised the existing public administration by saying, "Politicians have garbaged the public administration and the poor and the middle-class have got accustomed to live with the situation."

"Corporate houses are using the government to scale heights and a time will come when the corporate sector will determine the way you think and interact. This is because there are no institutions in place to stop this from happening," Lyngdoh said.

Vijayalakshmi Viswanathan, financial commissioner (railways) said that good governance is the rhetoric of the day.