Getting rid of babus

The problem of a bloated bureaucracy is not because of the officers in the system, who are relatively few and do not cost much, but the "babus" or clerks and equivalents, who make up the bulk of the numbers.

They have little incentive to work, no disincentives can be applied, and the result is general public dissatisfaction "" which explains why Ms Jayalalithaa got such public support for her typically draconian methods of taming the animal in Tamil Nadu.

Now the central government proposes to reduce its army of clerks by a wholesale 60 per cent. This is good news, but seems over-ambitious when limited targets for reducing numbers have routinely been missed.

In shooting for a reduction in numbers, the government may even be tackling the wrong problem. For the underlying issue is not the babus themselves as the way in which government work is organised.

It is the latter that has to change if the numbers in government service are to be reduced, and this means moving from the file-driven system inherited from the days of the Raj, to an officer-driven system that is driven by meeting specific objectives rather than observing due process "" important as that is.

The Administrative Reforms Commission had looked at this and made some recommendations years (no, decades) ago, but little changed. If the government wants to change things now, it should first look at ways of changing its own functioning and of making this more result-oriented and citizen-friendly.

In the age of computers, this is not difficult. When 95 per cent of all documents for imports and exports are filed electronically, from remote locations, even before the cargo arrives at the country's air and sea ports, what work is really left for clerks in the customs offices?

The second point to note is that the government should rule by exception, and most clearances should not require multiple checking at different levels. Some of these changes have been proposed in the revenue department, for instance, and should result in the need for fewer babus.

Apart from the fact that the clerks are redundant, not having them around will force the remaining staffers to do things differently "" and more transparently. A few examples should make this clear.

Till a few years ago, land records were stored in the physical form in musty offices, full of clerks who had the only access to them, and the result was there for all to see.

It took ages, and often also a lot of speed money, to get land ownership transferred. Now, with computer-driven projects like Bhoomi in Karnataka and Sarita in Maharashtra, it's possible to get your land records changed within half an hour.

In the Kalyan-Dombivili municipality, there are even twin screens that allow citizens to check the entries being typed by the person on the other side of the help desk.

Some other broad-brush strokes are required. For instance, the postal and railway undertakings are departmentally run whereas they are nothing more than specific services provided to paying customers and do not need to be part of a modern government.

Both undertakings can be converted into autonomous corporations responsible for paying their own way by serving customers efficiently and competing in the market. Any subsidies that need to be given (and the postal service might require one) can be given through the Budget.

Finally, if the old and frequently discussed proposal of transferring centrally-sponsored schemes to the states can be implemented, the number of central ministries will shrink drastically in number.

Reducing price and other controls (as on movement of goods) will do likewise, so that the multiplication of the old food ministry into four separate ministries can be undone.

All of this will reduce the size of the central government to one that focuses on the essential national governance issues (finance, law and order, defence, external affairs, commerce and a few other pan-Indian issues) and leave the bulk of citizen-oriented and development programmes in the hands of the state governments, where they belong.

The problem, of course, is that reducing the size of the government in this manner and getting rid of the babus will also mean having a much smaller council of ministers.

Given the projected outcome of the elections and a multi-party alliance with growing claimants for ministerial thrones, this is like asking for the moon.