CHILD BEGGING IN INDIA – CAUSES, CURRENT SITUATION AND SUGGESTED REFORMS

CHILD BEGGING IN INDIA – CAUSES, CURRENT SITUATION AND SUGGESTED REFORMS:

Children comprise 50% of the earth’s population currently. Extremely vulnerable children can be seen begging on the streets and this is a glaring reality in every corner of our country. Even Norway, which is considered as one of the richest countries in the world is not free of this evil business. Every country has laid down laws to tackle this issue but success has been minimal. Though our Constitution expresses concern for upbringing children in safe, secure and healthy manner through various provisions but on the ground, all of those are still a long shot looking at the current state of affairs. There are not many studies on child beggars in India, however, with the limited ones available, let us explore the reasons and possible solutions for this in detail:

CAUSES OF CHILD BEGGING:

1.       Abject Poverty leads adults of families into begging and they also coerce their children into this business.

2.       Orphaned & abandoned children and the ones who run away from their native places due to poverty or any other reasons.

3.       Refugees.

4.       Religious sanctions provided by Indian culture & religion, where people believe feeding beggars outside religious places or the ones carrying a God’s picture in a steel bowl with oil is an act of good karma and wards off evil.

5.       Malnutrition.

6.       Juvenile Delinquency & Drug addiction.

7.       Manipulated and exploited by Adults.

8.       Organised Gangs/Begging mafia working who kidnap, buy & sell children (Human Trafficking) and maim them for this purpose.

9.       Psychological & Physical coercion.

10.   Easy money with no labour.

11.   Cross generation begging since no education prevails in many generations of beggars.

12.   No knowledge of their rights and rehabilitation provisions and afraid of their gang-lords.

13.   Nexus between organised gangs and law enforcers.

14.   Failure of Govt. schools to retain children.

15.   Failure of Governance to implement policies for such children effectively.

 INTERNATIONAL, CONSTITUTIONAL & LEGAL PROVISIONS (INDIA) FOR CHILDREN BEGGING:

 1924: The League of Nations adopted the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which established children’s rights as means for material, moral and spiritual development; special help when hungry, sick, disabled or orphaned; first call on relief when in distress; freedom from economic exploitation; and an upbringing that instills a sense of social responsibility.

1948: The UN General Assembly passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which referred in article 25 to childhood as “entitled to special care and assistance.” In 1959 the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which recognized rights such as freedom from discrimination and the right to a name and a nationality. It also specifically enshrined children’s rights to education, health, care and special protection. 1979 was declared as the International Year of the Child.

1989: The UN General Assembly unanimously approved the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which entered into force the following year.

1990: The World Summit for Children was held in New York. The leaders signed the World Declaration on the Survival, Protection and Development of Children as well as a Plan of Action for implementing the Declaration, setting goals to be achieved by the year 2000.

1999: The Convention concerning the Prohibition and Immediate Action for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour was adopted.

2000: The UN Millennium Development Goals incorporate specific targets related to children, including reducing sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography.

2002: The UN General Assembly held a Special Session on Children, meeting for the first time to specifically discuss children’s issues.

INDIAN CONSTITUTION:

Article 15 (3) enables the state to make special provisions for children.

Article 24 explicitly prohibits child labour and hazardous employment of children.

Article 39(f) further directs the state in its policy towards the well-being of the children.

Article 39 ( c ) provides that children of tender age should not be subject to abuse and should be given opportunities to develop in a healthy manner.

Article 45 makes provision for free and compulsory education for children.

Article 47 states that it is the duty of the state to raise the level of nutrition and standard of living and to improve public health. The courts in India have stated that a child cannot be treated as an inanimate object or like a property by the parents.

Exposure and abandonment of children by parents or others is a crime under section 317 of IPC. Kidnapping is a crime under sections 360, 361, 384, 363, 363 A (kidnapping for begging), 366, 367, 369 of IPC.

There are certain crimes against children which are punishable under special and local laws such as immoral traffic prevention act. The child labour act banned child labour in hotels, restaurants and as domestic servants. The Government of India passed the Children Act 1960 to introduce uniformity and to establish separate child welfare boards to handle cases relating to neglected children.

In 1974 the government adopted a National Policy for Children. The Indian legislature has enacted several legislations to improve and protect lives of children. The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2000 and its amendment in 2006, and Right to Education Act 2009 are significant in this regard.

Bombay Prevention of Begging Act in 1959 made begging a crime, and extended to other States including Delhi.

CURRENT SITUATION IN INDIA:

In India, by official statistics, roughly 60000 children (the real number is estimated to be much higher) disappear every year and an estimated 300000 child beggars in India. Even some people of the medical fraternity are also involved with the mafia gangs to help maim the children for a huge sum. In spite of a number of policies and laws set up for these purposes of helping such children, the govt. has been a big failure in curbing this due to lack of political will.  Apart from that, the unholy nexus between the begging gangs/mafia and the law enforcers is a big impediment in removing this social evil. Also, there is no coordination at all between the policy makers, bureaucrats and law enforcers as well as civil society and the lack of public awareness in this matter has led to an even more deteriorated situation than before.

REFORMS NEEDED:

· Compulsory schooling for all children which has already been laid down in Law via the RTE Act but the implementation and awareness needs to be spruced up in a major way and also the corruption involved in it need to be checked by a stringent body/mechanism in place.

· Sympathetic teachers and child friendly environment in schools because govt. & MCD schools lack these and that is the reason that the children dropout or abandon studies completely for life. A routine report and regular inspections/meetings need to be carried out for this purpose.

· No alms drive to educate the public.

· Adult guardians as well as those who criminally (mafia/gangs/traffickers) coerce children in to this trade need to be caught upon information gathered, and punished to make an example of to the others in this dirty business.

· Strict and speedy sentences meted out to the criminals as a punishment for kidnapping and maiming of children.

· Welfare policies for child beggars and their families such as monetary help, health and residence etc. 

· Good and more number of orphanage/ shelter homes for children without close relatives and advertise this everywhere for awareness.

· Railways should become more watchful as most of beggars are trafficked through this route and one can see a huge amount of beggars on the railway stations.

· Help to lower income/ poor including temporary emergency assistance and long term skill development for stable income and occupation.

· Increasing awareness of the general public of child helpline numbers and NGOs and Govt. Homes and Laws to help such children.

· Providing an incentive to parents along with counselling to send their wards to schools.

· In depth and a lot more studies and research into this issue to understand it in totality and issues with current schemes & policies. Increased coordination between the civil society, policy makers and implementers/law enforcers to bring their experience and authority to the table and work out a detailed and holistic plan to tackle this menace and eradicate it completely.

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Today we begin with what is Public Administration. The definition,nature and scope of this complex and very young discipline.

To begin with, Public Administration though practiced through time immemorial ( it is as old as humanity) on all parts of the earth,recently carved an identity for itself a few decades back as a seperate discipline.

It swirled into the limelight through Woodrow Wilson's controversial paper in the Political Science Quarterly ( Journal) in 1887 that advocated a seperate field of study for the art and science of Public Administration since Political Science did not have the answers to many questions of Public Administration. He advocated a comparative study of public administration with other nations to know our strengths and weaknesses of Public Administration as being practiced in US at  that point in time. He asserted that if US wanted to become the best then it had to get skilled in the art and techniques of public administration by making it more businesslike and totally cut off from the interference of the political executive who knew nothing about the technicalities of implementation of public policy.

This was called the era of the politics-administration dichotomy(divide) that continued till the 1920's. 

Thus began a spate of theories that helped in the evolution of Public Administration as a seperate discipline and matter of great research and analysis.

Now since today we are to talk about the basics we will proceed with the stages of evolution of the discipline of Public Administration in my next blog.

Definition:

Public Administration is the State Administration or Government Administration. Here Public is used as a synonym for Govt/State and not in the traditional sense of the word 'public'. So it is the govt's administration activities in process i.e. implementation of all its programmes and policies as well as other routine jobs. It is the management of the state/govt affairs at all levels - national,state and local. It is the govt. in action that implements and realises the purposes and goals. It is run by bureaucrats working under various ministries/departments.

Nigro & Nigro sum up Public Administration as follows:

• It is a co-operative group effort in a public setting.
• Has an important role in public policy formulation
• covers all three branches of the govt./state - i.e. executive,legislature and judicial.
• different from private administration(profit oriented businesses)
• is closely associated with private groups and people in providing services to the community smoothly and directly.
• Is non-polictical though operating in a political system.
• deals with goal achievement of the govt,the sovereign will of the people's interests and laws.
• It is interdisciplinary in nature as in it draws from many other social sciences and their theories like sociology,psychology,economics,law,etc.

NATURE OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRAION:

Nature means the type or main characteristic of something and what is to be expected from it as per its behaviour/nature.

Public administration's nature and the study concerning it approaches it through two views: Integral view and Managerial view.

Both are quite plain to understand. The Integral view states that Public Administration is each and every activity that is performed in an organization working towards a particular goal of the stae/govt. This means right from the top managerial officers to the very bottom manual workers,all are part of public administration as a process.

On the other hand the Managerial view only takes into account the managerial activities of an organization.

It is bothered only about the activities that get things done instead of doing things(as stated in integral view).

Now you have to understand that both of these views are necessary and hold water in particular organizations.

The integral approach is suited for the postal dept since over there everybody from the top job to the post man's job is of importance. Whereas the mangerial view can be applied to each and every organizations, since POSDCORB ( Planning,organising,staffing,directing,co-ordinatinating,reporting and budgeting) activities as prescribed by Luther Gulick are present in every organization.

SCOPE OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION:

As a activity and a discipline(area of study) Public Administration entails the following processes:

• Luther Gulick's POSDCORB(already explained above) activities of an organization.
• Walker's Administrative theory - that studies the structures,organisations,functions and methods of all types of public authorities at all levels. And the APPLIED ADMINISTRATION which studies the exec-legislative relationship and minister-official relationship,delegated legislation,preperation of budget by officials,educational administration,military administration,social policies,economic activities of the govt.,foreign policy,problems and techniques of imperial domination over other nations and local administration.
• Pfifner - he talks about management of personnel,public financing and administrative accountabilty to the people throught their ministers alongwith the abovementioned.
• SUBJECT MATTER VIEW: Certain organizations cannot follow the straightjacket formula and way of functioning as listed above as their subject matter is totally different,like for example the police department and intelligence bureaus have their own procedures and techniques followed to gather intelligence and protect the people.

DISTINCTION BETWEEN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE ADMINISTRATION:

• Public admin is bureaucratic whereas pvt administration is businesslike.
• public admin is political(ministerial responsibility) whereas pvt admin is non political.
• there are high instances of red tapism in public admin whereas pvt admin is free from it.
• Public admin follows uniform laws whereas pvt admin follows dynamism in  its way of working.
• public admin is controlled financially from outside through the legislature,pvt admin is free from such processes.
• no profit motive/marginal return policy of public admin whereas pvt admin is built for profit
• breadth and scope of public admin is mammoth.
• public admin is accountable to the public.
• public admin acts an agent of change and transformation in society.
• anonymity of officials in public admin.

SIMILARITIES BETWEEN PUBLIC AND PVT ADMIN:

• Common skills and techniques for management process.
• both serve people and be informative toward them.
• in modern times profit motive is not peculiar even to public administration.
• pvt organisations have taken a lot from the personnel mgmnt practices of the public admin organizations.
• similar type of hierarchy and management systems.
• both carry on continuous efforts to better themselves and provide efficient delivery of services to people or customers.

IMPORTANCE OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION:

• It is the basis of govt. - A govt. can exist without a legislature or even an independent judiciary but not without administration.
• An instrument for providing services to people.
• Instrument to implement policies through qualified and skilled officials.
• Stabilising force in society.
• Instrument of social change and upliftment and economic development.
• it has a technical character to it.

REASONS FOR THE GROWTH OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION:

• Industrial revolution that brought in socio-economic disparities and made the rich richer and poor poorer and so the govt. had to assume a new role to protect workers and the weaker sections of society.
• Emergence of Welfare and democratic State: To serve all sections of society and reduce the disparity of socio-economic status of people in society due to the above and other factors by controlling pvt enterprises and meeting state objectives.
• Economic Planning- very important in developing countries for socio economic development.
• Scientific and technological development for betterment of people and society.
• population growth,warfare,increased natural and man made disaster,communalist activities causing violence,terrorism,etc.

Conflict Resolution - A Redefinition

Loomis and Loomis state that Conflict is an ever present process in human relations. Conflict may define, maintain and strengthen group boundaries,contributing to the group's distinctiveness and increasing group solidarity and cohesion.

CHANGING NATURE OF CONFLICT:

Earlier theories and discussions regarding conflicts were only done with regards to organisations and to a limited extent to the environment of organisations and even these were confined to efficiency and productivity of enterprises. But now, policies are not made in isolation, as globalisation has made it a universal and worldwide process involving all types of stakeholders which are not limited to groups or nations but triggered by ethnic,religious,racial and economic differences as well, therefore conflict resolution has now been redefined or updated to help resolve these issues of international conflicts/disagreements between stakeholders.

PHASES OF CONFLICTS:

1) Potential Conflict Phase : At this stage conflict is present at very low level of intensity. Structural factors and underlying causes create division among groups along socio economic, cultural and political lines. Mobilisation of collective discontentment begins but not organised, thus, preventive action at this point is not risky and has high potential payoff.

2) Gestation Phase: Consolidation of mobilisation is the characteristic of this phase as inter-group relations are politicised and popular mobilisation puts pressure on decision makers to address the issues. Polarisation between groups increase but one must take note that issues are still negotiable though preventive actions may cost initially but the potential payoffs are still much positive.

3) Triggering and Escalation Phase : There is a real and visible change in the group's economic,social or political conditions can trigger the escalation of conflict. Inter elite ties break down and social interactions focus on organised reaction as political exchanges fade and conflicting parties lose confidence in each other and feel they cannot compromise. Intervention at this phase becomes risky as well as costly.

4) Post - Conflict Phase : In this phase preventive interventions aim at reestablishing communication channels between the conflicting groups,in order to avoid a new round of conflict.

These need not occur in the manner laid out and often the lack of information or incentives to act fast are barriers to resolving conflicts.

CONFLICT RESOLUTION AT THE MICRO LEVEL:

1) Intra Organisational Level - These are conflicts occurring within organisations.

A) Task conflict - Disagreement about the Communication or directions from superiors among subordinates as some of the orders may lie outside their " Zone of Acceptance". The leadership should make sure that they substantiate their communications among the subordinates to resolve this and the ways to do this are suggested by Mary Parker Follett:

i) Domination to resolve a conflict- Here only one party wins which is the stronger one. The weaker party remains disgruntled and this will lead to very ugly consequences later. therefore this should be avoided.

ii) Compromise - Where no party benefits but settle mutually for the time being. But this sort of resolution is only a short term one and the conflicts keep building up internally and become more dangerous when it shows its face again and then it might become out of hand to even try to settle it. This method also she did not suggest much.

iii) Integration to resolve a conflict - Follett considers this technique to be the best. As under this method there is a feeling of win-win equation & both conflicting groups see their issues addressed. And this is long term solution.

THE PROCESS OF INTEGRATION(in detail):

This process unfolds in three steps:

a) Surfacing of conflict or identification of existing issue.

b) Analysis of the conflict and development of a solution - A solution should be such that it no way leaves any room for the conflict resurfacing or a new conflict arising and it should benefit all and a circular response should be evoked where every member gets to vent out his feelings so that he feels heard.

c) Anticipation of results.

HINDRANCES TO THE SMOOTH IMPLEMENTATION OF THE PROCESS OF INTEGRATION:

a) It requires high degree of knowledge and analysis.

b) It requires high order of creativity and innovation

c) It may require more resources.

d) Superiors may have the tendency to continue domination.

e) True integration may not be achieved as groups may not agree to substitution.

f) Rushing to the application of scheme may create problems as its proper comprehension may require time.

g) Groups may feel inadequately represented but may not show at that particular time when integration is seemed to be achieved.

B) Inter Group Conflict: It deals with relationships among people/teams in an organisation more than a task and it is inevitable, so to manage it for optimal group maintenance, a six step process has been described:

a) Recognition and acknowledgement that conflict exists

b) Analysis of the existing situation

c) Facilitation of communication

d) Negotiation

e) Provision for necessary adjustments,reinforcements,confirmations

f) Realisation of living with conflicts as all conflicts cannot be resolved

C) Procedural Conflict : It occurs when group members disagree about the procedure to be followed in accomplishing the group goal. Solutions are-

a) New procedures may be formulated and a new agenda suggested.

b) Group goal may be modified

 This along with Task Conflict is of productive nature and brings in many reforms in the way of doing things more efficiently in the eyes of the higher management/decision makers.

That was about Intra - Organisational conflicts or within an organisation conflicts. Now we move on to discussing Intra Organisation Conflicts or conflicts occurring amongst two or more organisations.

INTRA ORGANISATIONAL CONFLICTS:

It has two aspects.

A) Environment of the particular organisation-: Two organisations may be in the same environment but clashing goals. For example - Scheduled Tribes ( Recognition of forest rights) Act 2005, while Ministry of Environment and forests may be concerned about the depleting forest cover by allowing more and more rural people into them for livelihood, on the other hand the Ministry of Tribal Affairs may be tackling the livelihood issues of the tribals. Thus such incompatible goals create conflicts that may lead to jurisdictional conflicts as well as the issue would be the control over areas given to tribals.

B) Institutional Pluralism -: In an effort for efficient governance and government services sometimes many service delivery agencies operate in the same domain, both in the private and public sphere and compete with each other. Conflict and competition may not be confused here as though they both have a common root cause of individuals striving towards incompatible goals, yet the major difference is that interference that hinders attainment of the goal, if done by established rules and regulations is termed as competition but when no rules are followed then it turns into a conflict.

CONFLICT MANAGEMENT AT THE MACRO LEVEL:

i) Policy making as Conflict Resolution,here all interest groups, protest groups and civil society as well as all stakeholders of a policy initiative should democratically contemplate and arrive at policies suitable to all so that conflicts do not arise as far as possible.

ii) Proactive Conflict Resolution. Catch the conflict when it is young instead of letting it escalate.

iii) Integrated Conflict management systems.

iv) Strengthening all government and non government institutions to tackle conflicts.

v) A central coordinating point for all conflict resolution efforts. A very good example of which is the prime minister's office in India where it intervenes between conflicts of ministries.

vi) Strong system evaluation and monitoring mechanisms.

vii) Capacity Building of individuals and institutions.

viii) People's participation as much as possible

ix) Civil society organisations

x) International Organisations of Conflict Resolution ( UNO,ICJ,etc) who work by international treaties and  charters,mandates while negotiating and arbitrating international disputes brought before them 

The perennial generalist vs specialist debate - TSR Subramanian

Half-baked impractical ideas such as lateral entry should not be encouraged. The room for abuse is enormous

The specialist vs. generalist debate in India’s civil services resurfaces periodically. One has seen a chief of the electricity board, an excellent engineer who managed his power plants and transmission systems extremely well, totally clueless in matters relating to power policy. One has also seen a first-rate irrigation chief engineer taking over as secretary of the irrigation department and floundering from day one on administrative issues. On the other hand, there have been many scientists, long abdicating their scientific work, turn into fine administrators and policymakers. It is not uncommon to find IAS secretaries, with excellent reputation, often unable to find their feet in ‘alien’ departments. There is no hard and fast rule in such matters; the suitability and background of each officer for a post is more relevant than his label.

Having said that, it has often been found suboptimal to have a specialist to head a department – say the ministry of energy or ministry of power. By definition, all specialists focus on their own specific fields, and each technical field has a hundred branches. An expert on electrical transmission may not have better advisory capability in the field of solar or hydrogen energy than a non-engineer with an open mind; in most fields rapid development has taken place in the past decades – our expert has learnt his specialty years back, and may be out of date even in his own specialisation. The generalist is not afraid of asking questions, consults many experts before a position is taken – more often than not the specialist tends to take the view that he knows all in his field, and often shuns other opinion. 

The author of this piece had occasion recently to prepare a study for the government on two separate fields – environment, and post office reforms. In the area broadly referred to as ‘environment and climate change’, it was an eye-opener to find at least a hundred separate fields of specialisation; often experts and agencies working in one may not be aware even of the existence of many others. Thus, forestry itself has any number of branches – if you add technical, commercial and social forestry issues, the fields of specialisation get multiplied. The arena of pollution – air and water – itself accommodates hundreds of expert fields. The committee that did the study would not have really been able to take a holistic view by talking just to one expert, however renowned – they met over a hundred, to get the picture. Likewise, the issue of postal reform covered a variety of fields – telecom spectrum, optical fibre connectivity, Unique Identity issues, insurance for life / accident / crops, logistics for e-commerce, to mention a few; doubtless, each of these would open up into many more specialised fields of expertise. Thus only an officer with intimate knowledge of the system, with decades of background and experience (needless to say with some imagination, insight and innovation), could bring together different experts to tackle each element of a new strategy. These illustrate the fallacy of repeatedly referring to need to replace ‘generalists’ with ‘specialists’.

The management of public affairs, as practised in India, is a highly specialised field; practitioners have to learn this profession, by working in the field – the university or training institutions will not prepare a person to deal with politicians, crooks, public grievances, riots, floods, policy-making in hundred fields, dealing with the police and the judiciary – none of these is taught in engineering schools or in MBA courses. Robust commonsense, coupled with a sense of dedication, pride, professionalism, and experience from years of working as a field officer and in the secretariat are the key requirements to make an administrator. 

Another metaphor may be drawn to make comparison – should a senior citizen, with many ailments not unusual for his age, have only one ‘expert’ doctor as his consultant, or should he rely on a ‘generalist’ doctor? This is not a hypothetical question. A person with high BP and diabetes (standard for most Indians), a weak spine (not unusual for government servants, particularly for those who have one), and poor lung capacity (normal for Delhi citizens, indeed of any city in India) – should he take advice directly from six different experts, without the assistance of a generalist all-round doctor, to interpret, moderate and balance the frequently conflicting ‘expert advice’? This is the role that the professional generalist, with two to three decades of experience is able to play in the system.

The question then may be asked that when the minister himself is a generalist, why one needs a secretary who is also a generalist. The minister is an expert in politics, manoeuvring public opinion, making wild promises, generally shrewd but weak in comprehension of complex issues; without being overly uncharitable, his main management task is to ensure that the ruling party’s political image remains intact; that in most cases, the special interest groups (aka ‘mafias’) that he is beholden to is benefitted; and that everything he does will ensure a good chance of his re-election. Do not be fooled by appellations – our ministers, especially in the states, do not have the same IQ or probity or experience quotient displayed by their counterparts in developed countries; the minister is just not cut out to be an administrator.

The UPSC is a key institution, one of the few which has maintained pristine standards; none has seriously questioned its process of selecting the best candidates for the civil services. The IAS is selected through a competitive examination – not on pass or fail basis; the system is designed to test overall comprehension, analytical ability, and optimal approach to situations, rather than specialisation; it would not make a difference whether a ‘generalist’ or a ‘professional’ is inducted into the service.

The second administrative reforms commission had recommended ‘lateral’ recruitment at the additional secretary and secretary levels. Many, at first sight, may see this as logical. The fact is that even now, at the government of India level, the secretary-level posts are evenly divided among all-India service officers, and experts in their own fields – most of them spending their career in government, rising to the top. Having worked in the system at the secretariat, the ‘expert’ may not have field experience (so essential to any policymaker or administrator whose recommendations / decisions would have impact on the citizen); however, he has understood the governmental system, which itself is highly specialised. Thus an Abdul Kalam or a Kasturirangan, who contributed during their time to governance, were both products of the system; the likes of Montek Singh Ahluwalia also were experts in their own field, but they thrived within the environment of the governmental milieu. It is a moot question whether an outside expert brought in, so to speak cold-turkey, to a line-department like telecom or agriculture or commerce would be able to hit the deck running – he would take at least a couple of years to understand the way decisions are examined and taken within the system, the operation of various institutional factors such as party politics, the judicial system, the  parliament, the CAG and other statutory and constitutional agencies, not to speak of the impact of media or the NGOs or the social media on decision making. This is not to belittle or downplay the role of experts – they are of vital importance to provide high quality technical inputs, and raise the quality of approach to complex issues. Do not downgrade them by asking them to be ‘pen-pushing’ babus. 

Do not demean our talented experts to waste their time dealing with inconsequential parliamentary questions. Equally, do not demean the senior professional civil servant, chosen from among the best talent available in India, with two-or-three-decades of relevant experience – he is generally irreplaceable. 

One other significant point needs to be highlighted. India has borrowed its administrative structure from Whitehall – not from the US, where each minister is allowed to choose his own senior advisers, who leave their private jobs as experts to join the minister’s team for a five-year stint; in the US they are team members, and identify their personal interests solely with that of the minister. In India such a concept will have disastrous impact – will make a corrupt system infinitely worse, in most situations. In India the governance pattern is ‘adversarial’ – the secretary’s role is to render dispassionate non-partisan advice; he is also responsible, as a career functionary, for the propriety of the advice he tenders. Besides, Indian administration does not have the checks and balances that US has, where most proposals are looked at through committees at different levels. Only a person who does not understand the basics, as well as the complex nature of Indian administrative practice, would trust short-term advisers at the highest levels, who will exercise authority without responsibility. Lateral entry will spell disaster, particularly in states where methods will be found to induct persons with limited expertise but dubious integrity, to loot the system. Again, before lateral entry is considered, there needs to be a clear understanding of what the current gaps are, and how – if at all – lateral entry will fill them. 

The present system of postings and transfers is frequently irrational, especially in the states. However, it needs to be ensured that at the additional secretary/ secretary level it will be unwise and counterproductive to post a career civil servant, who does not have previous experience in that broad field. At the level of secretary, there is no time to learn the broad milieu and general features of that particular field, indeed its ‘lingo’; there is no place for people with no previous exposure. Career planning for the services should ensure that the officer posted at the secretary level should have done at least one assignment at deputy secretary / director / joint secretary levels, to give him a sense of familiarity, as also to ensure that he is fully effective from day one.

No one questions the need for reform of the civil service, which ought to be a continuous process, as in every other sphere. Politicisation of the civil services has taken roots. The level of corruption in many civil services has reached worrisome, if not alarming, levels – though miniscule compared to the political arena. The morale of the civil servants themselves is low, particularly in the states. Some, who have little understanding of Indian governance, have even asked whether the time has come to abolish the all-India services. 

Don’t throw the baby with the bath water. What is needed is reform, not scrapping the system. Civil servants should be enabled to perform with freedom, efficacy and accountability. For this, one should reach out to tackle the core problems, not just tinker with peripheral issues. The necessary political will has to be summoned, if such a thing were possible, to tone up and cleanse the civil services.

The core problems afflicting the civil services stem from larger political causes, relating to unstable state governments, rampant corruption in the states and operation of mafias, and an insecure political executive exploiting the public servant for narrow personal ends. Politics having become the most lucrative business in the country, with few checks and controls, there is compulsion for the minister or political leader to tempt or coerce civil servants to collude with him for mutual benefit. Frequent transfers, ministers hand-picking the officials to work with them and sidelining of efficient but honest officers are common now, especially in the states.  An array of weapons is used: arbitrary transfers, control over the annual character roll entry, and unleashing of departmental inquiries to keep civil servants off balance and submissive, prodding them to collusion. These are the key issues which need to be addressed, for a meaningful reform.  

The main weaknesses in our governance structure do not emanate from the civil services. Currently, the real problems lie elsewhere. The political scene is unprincipled, unscrupulous, and untrammelled – there is no effective check against excesses and delinquency of the political executive. Political reforms should be highest on the agenda. This is possible only if there is significant election reform. Judicial reform, about which much is not yet talked about, also ranks in the forefront. One should avoid the temptation to look for ‘easy’ solutions, barking up the wrong tree – since the civil servant is the easiest target to hit. Half-baked impractical ideas such as lateral entry should not be encouraged – the room for abuse is enormous. 

Subramanian is a former cabinet secretary.

(The article appears in the June 16-30, 2015 issue)

Courtesy: http://www.governancenow.com/views/columns/the-perennial-generalist-vs-specialist-debate

A NEW PUBLIC POLICY FOR A NEW INDIA by Shiv Visvanathan

What makes public policy exciting and potentially inventive is the contested nature of the public sphere. It is anchored in a diversity of perspectives which challenges the dominance of one subject.

India is a country full of paradoxes. The elite in the country are forward-looking; they emphasise the need for reskilling but they conduct all this with backward-looking institutions. An acute observer once said: “we want to be [a] knowledge economy without reflecting on the demands of [a] knowledge society. As a result, we lack the institutions to be systematically innovative and our policies seem short run and erratic. We are being outfought and out-thought in the realm of knowledge and policy, while confusing rhetorical victories for real time gains.”

In fact, our new regime talks of the demise of the Planning Commission as a feather in its cap. It conflates the existence of the Planning Commission with the ideology of the previous regime and treats it merely as a policy issue. Today, our medical and our environmental policies, for example, are in a shambles, and yet there are no relevant spaces to debate them. We are a tangled, regulatory society without being “socialist” in terms of justice, which we set out to be.

          Confusion over distinctions

Let’s face it. Our knowledge society does not differentiate between information and knowledge. Knowledge is embodied, epistemic, and has tacit elements. By confusing information and knowledge, we lack critical thinking, the metalanguages and the heuristics that go into the definition of knowledge. Central to such confusion is Sam Pitroda’s Knowledge Commission report of 2006 which equated the knowledge revolution to the information revolution and confused technology with epistemology.

In fact, the elite in India do not realise that of the four revolutions of the 20th century, in Quantum physics, Genetics, in Linguistics and in Knowledge, the last two bypassed us. The profound Linguistic revolution had no impact in India despite the fact that an exceptional linguist like Ferdinand de Saussure was a professor of Sanskrit at Geneva in the same period. While the footprints of the Quantum revolution appeared in India well after World War II, the knowledge revolution led by Gregory Bateson, Thomas Kuhn and Claude Levi Strauss never excited us.

Contemporary India, in that sense, was never sensitive to the genealogies of knowledge. We boasted of the Planning Commission and the Knowledge Commission, of the D.S. Kothari Commission but saw education and knowledge in instrumental terms. To add to our problems, we misread the managerial revolution and the debates on governance and democracy. We revamped a few commerce departments and believed that we had reinvented management. But our Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) had little research sensitivity. We consumed knowledge but we rarely added creatively to the stockpile. India became a consumer of knowledge rather than a translator or an inventor of knowledge systems.

          Knowledge and power

This background is necessary to understand the new relations between knowledge and power. Linking the two is the field called policy. It also creates two kinds of intellectuals, the policy intellectual and the public intellectual.

The distinction is critical. The policy intellectual serves as an extension of the state. He/she is more a product of think tanks, of groups which strictly cater to policy interests of the state or of corporations. A public intellectual is a figure who provides a wide-ranging critique of policy, and looks more creatively at the relation between knowledge and power. A knowledge society needs both sets of intellectuals. The late Sukhamoy Chakravarty, the economist, was a great policy intellectual. Ashis Nandy, Rajni Kothari and U.R. Ananthamurthy belong to the category of public intellectuals. The policy intellectual usually takes his expertise for granted. The public intellectual questions the nature of expertise, probing deeper into the ethics and genealogy of ideas. In the post-liberalisation period, India has had more policy than public intellectuals with think tanks like the Centre for Policy Research and the Observer Research Foundation dominating the scene.

The think tanks and their attempts to formulate policy raise the whole question of the relation between knowledge and the public sphere. Policy formulation has not really articulated the views of the public sphere. In fact, the first challenges to policy came from the social movements, and from civil society which identified policy and experts as mere extensions to the state. The movements that grew around the Bhopal gas tragedy, the Narmada dam; the narratives of displacement and dispossession raised deep questions about policy and expertise, and about the public consumption of policy. Governance is now seen no longer as a statist exercise and the question of governmentality involves civil society articulating new epistemologies, notions of citizenship, ideas about the democratisation of knowledge and the assessment of public policy impacts. Governance has become tied to democracy, with the public sphere becoming crucial and public policy a critical field.

          Field of the future 

Public policy is not its impoverished, mechanistic cousin, Public Administration. Jawaharlal Nehru started the Indian Institute of Public Administration on the basis of the Paul Appleby report. Public policy became that empty space between management and public administration. It had a different texture and different requirements. Management schools in India have never succeeded in establishing a successful school of public policy as all efforts have become annexes of departments of economics.

Public administration is more a monument to the bureaucratic ego in India than to administrative reflexivity. As experiments, public policy has never succeeded, and yet today is a fast growing field with new departments at various institutions and universities. So far, it is a case of necessity not generating adequate inventiveness in our institutions. Yet, public policy is one of the fields of the future, linking as it does, new notions of empowerment in democracy with new ideas of knowledge in policy.

What makes public policy exciting, protean and potentially inventive is the contested nature of the public sphere. It is anchored in a diversity of perspectives which challenges the dominance of one subject. For example, economics, which was almost a canonical discipline, now realises that it confronts a new commons of social sciences which sees its sense of measure as inadequate to understand freedom or suffering. The new developments in feminism, cultural studies, future studies and science studies have added an increasing plurality to the fields of knowledge. Today, the relation between the ‘expert’ and the ‘citizen’ has changed and new forms of knowledge have to be considered. One sees this particularly in the development of ecological policy.

Nature which was once taken for granted or seen as passive in the realm of knowledge is now becoming a part of the social contract. The problems of climate change, and the energy crisis have revealed that science and economics are inadequate to answer questions related to ecology. Revolutions in ecology show that panarchy, complexity and risk had created a non-Promethean science where policy is merely prudent and precautionary. The subject of ethics has made a big return into the making of these disciplines. A subject-wise understanding in terms of the old hierarchies of knowledge is inadequate for policy. We are looking for new modes of knowledge which are intercultural, interdisciplinary and holistic. The emphasis is now on emergence rather than certainty.

          New demands of democracy

These revolutions in knowledge have been catalysed by the new demands of democracy. Democracy is no more a passive exercise of citizenship reduced only to the exercise of periodic elections. Today, democracy is more proactive. The citizen knows more and demands more. She is ready to challenge the dominance of the expert. She senses that her active role is required to sustain a society. The public sphere today is more dynamic and contested.

One senses the excitement and the choices before India in the issues confronting us. In the 1950s, India treated nuclear energy as sacrosanct. Today, the fishermen of Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu, and the tribals and villagers in Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Gujarat are challenging the location of nuclear plants and even the feasibility of nuclear energy.

One sees similar debate on the future of biotechnology, for example on the need for Genetically Modified (GM) crops. For the first time, one saw an Environment Minister invite all stakeholders to a debate when in 2010, Mr. Jairam Ramesh of the Congress called for public consultations on the release of Bt brinjal. It was wonderful to watch the public sphere debating public policy on biotechnology.

The recent debates around growth, development and the fate of forests and the future of mining have also raised issues that public policy must answer. The new generation has to ask itself whether nature has rights: for example does a mountain have legal standing? When a tribal says that when a mountain dies, a myth dies, how does one translate his language into the dialects of policy? Recently, there was a report on the death of a waterfall. How does one analyse the death of a ‘myth’ through costs and benefits? Is a waterfall only about cusecs of water?

Similarly, the city raises its own seedbed of questions around the informal economy, the future of waste, issues of violence — all of which confront the policymaker. Ethics, science, suffering and philosophy cannot be ignored in any debate today. A student has to reach into the best of the academe to answer the new challenges to citizenship. One has to dream of futures in realistic terms going beyond the simplicity of smart cities to ask what urban space and urban imagination are.

Today, at a time when the university is in crisis, and the relevance of academics is in question, subjects such as public policy can revitalise the university, intensify the debates around intellectual life and show that the life of the public mind has new challenges. A subject like public policy is an invitation to construct a feasible future. It will be interesting to see how many Indians accept its challenge and construct the dream of a different India.

(Shiv Visvanathan is a professor at Jindal School of Government and Public Policy.)

Article courtesy: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/a-new-public-policy-for-a-new-india/article7070831.ece