The brouhaha over the shabby manner in which the Government of India dealt with a file relating to an honour to be bestowed on chess grandmaster Vishwanathan Anand, at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad last week, focused almost entirely on the inefficiency of Indian bureaucracy.
Why should it have taken so much time for the ministry’s consent to be sent to the hosts at Hyderabad; was the official concerned unaware of Mr Anand’s citizenship, and such like questions have been debated. Government officials blamed the university for not doing the paperwork in time. The question of academic autonomy got lost in the cacophony that followed.
The problem may have been created by individual inefficiency or systemic inertia, but the material issue of why a university needs governmental approval for a professional decision has not received much attention.
Often well-meaning individuals in government become prisoners of the system. In an administrative culture where there is very little reward for risk-taking and initiative, where the culture of informal decision-making has been gradually replaced by obsessive formalism, where there is high reward for conformism and safety in rule-bound “proceduralism”, such faux pas cost nothing, especially when an officer’s chances for promotion and posting are rarely impacted by such foibles.
The question that I seek an answer to is why should any academic institution seek a ministry’s vetting of a list of persons it wishes to honour? There are professional bodies that take a professional view and there is peer review of the choices made in awarding such honours. Why should any ministry or even the president of the republic have to vet such a list?
The official reply to that question is that under government rules the procedure for conferring a doctorate on a foreigner is different from that for Indian citizens! Why? Because the government wants to make sure that no educational institution confers such an honour on an anti-national person! Yes, that is the reply I got!
“Imagine”, I was told by a responsible functionary of the government, “that some university decides to confer a doctorate on a terrorist, or a sympathiser of the Khalistanis.”
The president and prime minister routinely give away awards and honours these days to all and sundry, from official platforms and private ones. Indeed, even when arms of the government object to certain individuals being so honoured, they are over-ruled for political reasons. The president of India was pleased to give a non-resident Indian, Sant Singh Chatwal, a Padma Bhushan. Mr Chatwal is not a Khalistani but the government’s own Intelligence Bureau did not clear his name for even a Padma Shri the previous year. How ironic that in the same year that we had the dubious case of Mr Chatwal, we now have the curious case of Mr Anand.
While many have raised the question about the relevance of Mr Anand’s nationality to the bestowing of an honour by a community of mathematicians and a university, what puzzles me is why the official concerned did not simply pick up his telephone and ask someone for the required information. Why does one have to “put up a file” and send out an official letter by snail mail for that information? In this day and age when information is available 24x7 with the help of the Internet, email and mobile phones, why should archaic government procedure be adopted even in such cases?
A google search would have helped. A phone call would have sufficed. To actually seek and secure a photocopy of Mr Anand’s passport to establish the veracity of his citizenship was the height of bureaucratic insecurity and, paradoxically, arrogance. In a different era, a self-confident yet civilised official of the government would simply have called “a couple of chaps”, perhaps a “batchmate” in Chennai, who could have made another phone call and the matter would have been resolved in minutes. That culture of informal communication is dying. Insecurity has bred distrust and fed “proceduralism”.
When I started using sms as a means of communicating with the media during my tenure in the Prime Minister’s Office, I was often warned by officials that this was not the “procedure” to follow. How can a prime ministerial statement be issued to the media via sms? The correct procedure that a risk-averse civil servant would have followed would have been to type out a press release and have it released, after due “notings” have been made up the ladder of risk aversion.
Again, like in the Chatwal case, when really important information on the movement of a file is needed, as for instance on the question of who issued orders enabling Warren Anderson of Union Carbide to leave India, we are now told that there is no paper trail in government files to show who said what to whom. For every file that is created on an issue like Mr Anand’s nationality, tens of files on far more important and delicate issues are either misplaced or lost or stolen or just destroyed!
In this era of instant communication, it is truly incredible that it took an officer of the HRD ministry an entire month to find out the nationality of one of India’s most celebrated sportspersons! And, to top it all, Mr Anand had to actually fax a photocopy of his passport to prove his claim! A “yes, I am Indian” on phone or via sms should have sufficed. But such trust-based governance is no longer on the menu. Everyone wants a piece of paper. Give it in writing, get it attested, by a notary, a gazette officer. There's no place for paperless governance in the land of 'proceduralism'. Paper tigers reign supreme.
