Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar

Pay, perks and performance

For those of you who had not picked up your copies earlier from the Bengali Market halwai, Justice Pandian, chairman, Fifth Pay Commission, has now officially made his report available to the nation, courtesy the finance minister, who is, technically, the first startled recipient of his recommendations. The recommendations have, as happens every time, brought to the fore the sectarian rivalries within the largest biradari in the country -- the army of its civil servants (who, of course, are so called because they are rarely civil and never servants).

The Pay Commission, however, is not a commission on administrative reforms and, therefore, has to take the existing system more or less for granted, the better to concentrate on what can be done to make the machine purr a little smoother. It would have been a little too radical for the Pay Commission to have asked itself whether the time has not come to throw away the machine and give ourselves an altogether different system of administration.

Yet, the presentation of the Pay Commission Report does furnish an occasion for reflection on why the citizens of this country are so disillusioned with that legacy of British imperialism which, at Independence, was widely regarded as the most enduring asset of British rule -- the 'steel frame' of administration.

In 1947, the higher echelons of the civil service were objects of respect amounting to veneration because they were widely perceived as honest, just, impartial and dedicated to a cause larger than themselves; and the lower echelons as efficient and purposive, if not entirely above a spot of palm-greasing.

Mahatma Gandhi was almost alone in thinking that paternalistic administration of the ICS kind was passe and needed to be replaced by self-administered units of local government so autonomous and self-reliant as to be called 'village republics'. His assassination on January 30, 1948, conveniently removed the last road-block on the way to handing over the destiny of our newly-independent nation to a Frankenstein's monster, the IAS-led bureaucracy which, with the malign protection and patronage of our home-grown Frankenstein, the political classes, has brought us to this pitch of despair in the 50th year of our Independence.

Politcocracy and babucracy have together undermined much of what has passed for 50 years as democracy, Greco-Latin for 'rule by the people (demos).'

Don't get me wrong. Individual members of the civil services, in their thousands, are honest, efficient, purposive men and women, whose personal contribution to decency and good governance provides more than enough material for a hundred contemporary Philip Masons to compile admiring profiles in post-Independence administration to rival Mason's panting paeans of praise to The Men Who Ruled India as the Platonic philosopher-kings of the British Empire. But it is these very thousands who would be the first to tell you from the inside that their residual nobility lies in rising above the system, not working it.

The Fifth Pay Commission has proceeded on the assumption that our administration has evolved into a humungous, slothful behemoth that needs to be made a little leaner and a lot more meaner to deliver more at less cost.

It has attempted to reconcile this insight with its other principal insight that for civil servants to function efficiently, they must be adequately remunerated, and for them to function honestly their remuneration must go beyond keeping the wolf from the door to inuring at least those with a modicum of integrity and ethics from the temptations which the better-heeled clients of the civil service are more than willing to place on offer.

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