For India's civil servants, life was not easy in 2013. They were at the receiving end of a great deal of criticism for many things that were wrong with governance. This was not surprising. With several decisions taken by the United Progressive Alliance government coming under the scrutiny of the Supreme Court, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), most civil servants posted at the Centre became extremely cautious. Nobody wanted to be associated with a decision that could become controversial. While the political leadership went into its shell, civil servants found that a convenient excuse to abstain from decision-making.
As a senior government official said jokingly, the only decision that civil servants took in 2013 was to approve leave applications from their juniors. This was, of course, an exaggeration, but it does convey the extent of policy paralysis that affected decision-making across various central ministries in New Delhi. Many civil servants found an easy way out of taking decisions in a situation in which each of their initiatives could be subjected to an inquiry by the CBI or the CAG. Instead of exercising their legitimate power to take a decision, they often set up a committee to examine the matter in question.
There were many advantages of setting up such a committee and referring a proposal to it. No individual civil servant could be hauled up if, under any circumstances, the decision eventually taken was to be investigated by the CBI or the CAG. No individual views or comments are noted when a committee of officials discusses a proposal. Only the final decision is recorded along with the reasons prompting such a decision. This was a smart way of taking a decision without exposing any individual official to charges of impropriety or malfeasance. If a decision was later found to be flawed, the charges would have to be levelled against the committee.
The inspiration for this perhaps came from the way the political leadership behaved while taking key decisions. Even empowered groups of ministers started refraining from taking a final decision on important policy issues. With ministers becoming reluctant to take the final call on key proposals and letting the Cabinet take a view and carry the responsibility of approving them, civil servants became even more defensive and sought refuge in the relative safety of a committee-based decision-making process. This often resulted in delays and decisions that failed to produce optimum results.
What made the civil servants even more defensive was the manner in which a former coal secretary, P C Parakh, was named in a first information report filed by the CBI in connection with the allotment of coal blocks to an Aditya Birla group company. Parakh had reviewed and modified a decision taken by a committee on allocation of coal blocks after receiving a fresh representation on the matter from the Prime Minister's Office. Parakh took that decision more than eight years ago. But CBI sleuths arrived at his Hyderabad residence in October to conduct searches and investigations into what he did in 2005. The incident made almost every civil servant a little cagey about taking decisions out of fear that what they decide now could be a matter of investigation and a cause for their harassment a decade later.
Then there was the Supreme Court order that did away with the need for the CBI to seek the government's approval before prosecuting civil servants in corruption cases monitored by the apex court. This meant that in all Supreme Court-monitored cases, including the coal blocks allocation scam or the Radia tape controversy, the CBI could prosecute civil servants without obtaining the sanction of the Union government as mandated in Section 6A of the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act. This has further upset civil servants, who have now ceased to enjoy the special protection they earlier had under the law.
And now, adding fuel to the fire, Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party, who took oath as Delhi's new chief minister last week, has asked all "honest" and "dynamic" civil servants to get in touch with him so that he could appoint them to important assignments to bring about the change he has promised in his party's election manifesto. This is an unusual move that is likely to further confuse civil servants. Several questions will arise from Kejriwal's message to civil servants.
What happens to those who do not respond to Kejriwal's call? Would they automatically be dubbed dishonest or lacking in dynamism? And would this change the basic character of India's civil service, which so far has distanced itself from politics or any political affiliation? Would those civil servants, who respond to Kejriwal's call, be flouting the code of conduct that currently governs them? Or, is Kejriwal opting for a kind of committed bureaucracy where top civil servants in the government are chosen because of their political leanings and commitment to the cause of the ruling party's political agenda?
Civil servants in India appear to have seen it all in 2013 - from contributing to the government's policy paralysis to becoming more vulnerable to prosecution by the CBI on charges of corruption and now to a call to be part of what clearly seems to be a committed bureaucracy. They will certainly look forward to a better 2014, and not as depressing and confusing as 2013 was.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
