Shailesh Pathak hit the nail on the head with the assertion in his letter that the government is of, by and for government employees (“The leading elite-III,” November 8). This is a remnant of the days of the British Raj when the only goal of the rulers was to perpetuate their rule. Accordingly, the system was run in a completely top-down fashion with all decisions being taken by the sahibs. The natives had only to faithfully and mindlessly carry out the orders. A carefully-planned system of loyalties and rewards (including the right to coerce and extract bribes from fellow natives) had been put in place to ensure that the tasks required were carried out meticulously. In this situation, the innate creativity of the native government servants was applied exclusively to extracting whatever benefits they could from “the system”.
This is what is continuing till this day in every government office that deals with ordinary people. An analysis by N C Saxena, Secretary to the Planning Commission in the 1990s, found that serving and retired government servants in India earn 7.4 times the per capita national income in India. Comparative figures for the US, various European countries and Nigeria are 0.9, 0.9 to 1.3 and 3.5, respectively. For the country’s rapid development we have to find a way of setting this right — but how?
Alok Sarkar, Kolkata
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