For all of you with a weakness for multiple choice quizzes, here's a question: What does IBDA stand for? (a) International bureau of demographic analysis (b) Interest before depreciation (c) Indian banks' development association (d) None of the above.
The correct answer is (d). IBDA in fact stands for a brand-new government initiative promoted by the ever-bountiful nanny state - a service known as the India-Based Domestic Assistant by the ministry of external affairs. Without a trace of irony, the spokesman of the ministry of external affairs, Syed Akbaruddin, announced it this week. The IBDA service, or entitlement, will be for diplomats taking domestic workers to the United States and Europe. In effect, domestic employees will become full-fledged government servants. The proposal, he said, had been pending with reluctant finance ministry moneybags since 2013 but "we are going to push it".
Finance ministry mandarins are right to hum and haw and tighten their purse strings over such a ludicrous scheme. Apart from additional expenditure, it goes against the government's professed policy of cutting down numbers. The idea is also fraught with unsettling administrative, political and moral implications. Other central services (the Indian Administrative Service, the Indian Revenue Service and so on) can demand similar nanny benefits, citing the hardship of bringing up children in postings with scarce or high-wage domestic labour. Privileged visas and travel arrangements for IBDA staff imply a return to "nod-and-wink" diplomacy where one country overlooks special perks outside strictly reciprocal norms. And isn't there something utterly antediluvian about IBDA when the Aam Aadmi Party is newly empowered in Delhi? Can the external affairs ministry be so unaware of the current zeitgeist?
The American view of civil servants like Devyani Khobragade is plainly this: they are uncivil lawbreakers who underpay servants. Following her flight from the US, Ms Khobragade stood outside South Block to give the media a poignant tale of how much she misses her small girls and when she might be reunited with them. (She was later asked to pipe down by Foreign Secretary Sujatha Singh.) Someone should advise her father, Uttam Khobragade, the ex-IAS officer and alleged Adarsh housing society beneficiary, to do the same. The way he goes on about his persecuted, brave and brilliant daughter, you would think she is a born-again Mother India toiling under the heavy yoke of evil foreign powers.
Millions of hard-working Indian women raise children with inadequate or no domestic help, but the bleeding-heart nanny state is heartless about creating IBDA-like support systems for them. Hundreds of Indian professionals in Manhattan, that Valhalla of American capitalism, have small children, keep punishing work hours, but go about their lives uncomplainingly.
Those who can afford the incredible luxury of full-time domestic staff pay through their noses. In New York, the going market rate is $15 an hour, $9 being the base legal wage; Ms Khobragade was paying less than $3 to Sangeeta Richard. "My wife and I pay our nanny $750 a week for a 10-hour day, Monday to Friday," a corporate lawyer in NYC I spoke to said. "If it's even one hour overtime we have to fork out that extra $15. Why blame the nanny for scooting? Those who can't afford the expense put their kids in daycare." Gloria Steinem, a leader of the women's movement, told me this week that campaigning for higher minimum wages for domestic labour is very much part of the feminist agenda, the majority of them being women. "We are fighting for stronger legislation in the US, state by state."
If the external affairs ministry doesn't know this, it should step out on Fifth Avenue and smell the latte. It should accept the fact that it should pay its diplomats much better if they can't manage without domestic help in high-income countries. Or it should post working mothers like Ms Khobragade to Dhaka or Dakar, where inexpensive ayahs are plentiful. Many foreign diplomats find assignments in India irresistible for some of these reasons. Floating IBDA is nothing but the nanny state's subterfuge to bloat its own size.
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