 GOVERNANCE AND THE SCLEROSIS THAT HAS SET IN
By Arun Shourie
ASA/Rupa
Price: Rs 395; Pages: 262 |
In
the last republic of fatalism moral anguish is unlikely to be a
bestseller. And dissent, the necessary rejoinder without which
no civil society is complete, is a forlorn activity of the
idealist. The growth rate of freedom may have made cultural and
technological boundaries rather redundant-virtues of digital
democracy-but tyranny still remains a classified document,
buried somewhere in the wood-panelled remoteness of governance. India
has been living with it since independence. Or, India has not been
living well because of it. Everybody's textbook case of
Democracy Unlimited is still one of unfreedom's showpieces.
Though, as a people, we don't say: after such knowledge, what
forgiveness. In the stoic state moral harrumphers have less
market value.
Then why is Arun Shourie's Governance an
important book? Or, more aptly perhaps, why is Shourie worth
listening to? Power is the common answer. In the beginning there
was Editor Shourie. Few bylines in Indian journalism had the
distinction of becoming a national pronoun. That is what his argument
with power had done to him. Then Shourie changed career. He
migrated from news columns to the same arena that once tormented
his conscience. Hence Minister Shourie. Was it the shift of a
disillusioned demolition man-let me be part of the system to
redeem it? Life as a minister marked the biggest moral crisis of
Citizen Shourie. Governance is confession in hardback.
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| PICTURE SPEAK |
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| SHOURIE: Return of the dissident |
Spread
across annotated pages brimming with clauses and quotation marks,
figures and charts and other parenthetic devices is an India that
doesn't move, in spite of the rustle of the file, which happens
to be the battered but immortal protagonist in the book. It is a
truism that the Indian bureaucracy, bloated and rusty, has set
the speed limit on the state's progress. On Shourie's pages, it
is a labyrinthine tribunal where decisions are unmade and
delayed with clockwork precision. Rich in surrealism and the art of
the absurd, the government apparat is independent of even the
natural laws of common sense, not to speak of national sense. It
is as if the manual of administration is co-authored by Franz
Kafka and George Orwell.
What else can explain the paper
picaresque kicked off by the colour of the ink on certain files
in the Ministry of Steel (see excerpt)? Every discovery is not
as entertaining-or harmless-as this one. As minister of
disinvestment in the Vajpayee government, Shourie had the insider's
privilege to see the rot in all its decaying detail. Take this. When
the privatisation of the ITDC hotels began, the minister
discovered that none had the title deed or lease documents in
order, and none had a fire-safety certificate or a completion
certificate. He devotes a major chunk of his frustration to show
how the bureaucratic vaudeville had made a mess of the policies
of privatisation and telecom. Particularly chilling is his
chronicle of how the government let the Bangladeshi immigrants change
the demographic as well as nationalist matrix. The state looked
the other way as madarasas, radical Islam's nurseries of hate,
sprouted along the border.
At the centre of
Shourie's argument is an India under attack, and he has seen the
mind of the enemy, the one that has been pampered by the Indian
state itself. The "enabling state", his ideal, is far from
India of the moment: "This is the real route to reform-continue
to transfer functions and power from the state structure to society ...
not reforming some particular procedure, but redefining the
nature of the state itself." As he worked from within the
system, he could not have done what his conscience demanded.
Power denied the dissident freedom. Today, Shourie is back in
his natural constituency: the province of argument where his
morality is not copyedited by the babus, and where the colour of
ink is not what determines the hierarchy of the text. He
celebrates liberation by writing back to the system that for a while
curtailed his instincts.
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| EXCERPT |
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The Ink-Blotched File Sometime
in early 1999-I was unable to fix the precise
date-two officers in the Ministry of Steel made some
notings on the files that passed through their
desks. What caught the eye of their colleagues and
superiors was not anything they had written, but the fact
that they had used red and green ink. Accordingly, on 13 April
1999, the Ministry of Steel wrote a "D.O. letter"
to the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public
Grievances. Can officers use ink other than blue or
black, the Ministry wanted to know. Are there
guidelines on the question? If so could these please
be forwarded to the undersigned.
The
letter arrived at the Department of Administrative
Reforms six days later though the buildings of the
two organizations are less than a kilometer away.
Research began. Consultations commenced. Ultimately
it was decided that, as the matter concerned ink
and as the Directorate of Printing had the requisite expertise
on ink-related matters, the opinion of the Directorate had
to be obtained.
Accordingly an "O.M."-an Office Memorandum-was sent
on 3 May 1999 to the Directorate of Printing. Will
the Directorate kindly clarify whether any effort is
authorized to use any ink other than blue or black
for noting, drafting and correspondence in the Secretariat?
Deliberations,
consultations, cogitation now began in the
Directorate of Printing. After three weeks of
thought, on 21 May 1999, the Directorate wrote to the Department
of Administrative Reforms. There are no
orders/instructions/guidelines in respect of use of
different colours of ink, they noted.... The
Department of Personnel and Training, Ministry of Home
Affairs, may, however, be consulted, they concluded....
On
6 July 1999, the Department of Personnel and
Training wrote to the Department of Administrative
Reforms. The question as to which ink may be used in notings/draftings/
correspondence pertains essentially to the Manual of
Office Procedure, the Department of Personnel
noted, and, under the Allocation of Business Rules,
the Manual of Office Procedure is regulated by the
Department of Administrative Reforms. Hence, the
Department of Administrative Reforms and Public
Grievances may take a view in this matter.
A perfect answer, as you can see. Throw the ball back.
On 28 July 1999 the officer concerned in the
Department of Administrative Reforms recorded that
as the decision on the use of different colours of ink has
to be taken by the Department itself, the criterion for adjudging
the issue should first be settled. He proposed that
the matter be judged in terms of the longevity of
the notings in inks of different colours. When a
file is closed, he noted, it is recorded as "A", "B"
or "C" category. In case it has been designated as
an "A" or "B" category file, it has to be kept
permanently. Hence, the colour of the ink that is
used for noting and correspondence in the file
should be long lasting, and it should not fade with
the passage of time. The matter, went the concluding
recommendation, may be taken up for discussion at the Senior
Officers Meeting.
The next level of officer to whom the file went
reasoned that the matter was not as simple as that.
Accordingly, he recorded that the longevity would also
be affected by the quality of the ink that had been used,
as well as on whether ball-point pens or ink pens had been
used. So, these factors needed to be decided along with
the question of the colour of the ink.
In view of the criterion that had been agreed
upon-the durability of the noting-and the multiplicity
of factors that were likely to affect it-the colour of the
ink, the quality of the ink as well as the type of the writing
instrument that had been used, it was felt that
views of the National Archives of India had to be
ascertained. After all, they are the ultimate
custodians of Government records....
And so, a letter was sent to the Director General,
National Archives of India, on 12 August 1999. It
sought comments of the National Archives on the longevity
of notings made in different colours of ink.
The Deputy Director of National Archives replied on
27 August 1999. Every record creating agency, he
wrote, in creating records of permanent nature
should use fountain pen inks and ball point pen inks of permanent
nature prescribed by the Bureau of Indian Standards as is:
221-1962, is: 220-1988, and is 1581-1975 in respect
of fountain pen inks of blue/ black colour; and is:
8505-1993 in respect of ball point pen ink. So far
as fountain pen ink of permanent nature is
concerned, the National Archives declared, the prescribed
colour is blue-black, while for ball point pens the colours
are blue, black, red or green. Longevity clearly was not a
sufficient criterion to clinch the question.
The letter from the National Archives was
accordingly placed before the Senior Officers' Meeting
on 22 September 1999 .... Consequent on the decision taken,
as the phrase goes, in the Senior Officers Meeting, a D.O.
was addressed on 4 October 1999 to the Joint Secretary
(O&M) in the Ministry of Defence seeking a copy
of the instructions contained in the relevant
manual of the armed forces/ Army so as to finalise
the implementation of a Uniform Ink Colour Code in
the Central Secretariat. The same day another communication
was sent to the Department of Personnel and Training seeking
instructions on the subject. Incidentally, such
instructions are available in printed form.
The Ministry of Defence replied on 22 December
1999. It stated that red ink is used by the Chief of
Army Staff/ Chief of Naval Staff/ Chief of Air Staff;
green ink is used by the Principal Staff Officers; and blue
or black ink is used by all other officers ....
The Department of Personnel and Training reiterated
that the matter is essentially a part of official
procedure, and would accordingly be the concern of
the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances...
A reply was finalized on 5 April 2000 for the Ministry of
Steel, the original querist, so to say....
But there was a much more consequential outcome.
Two additions were made in the Manual of Office Procedure-a
singular achievement. The bureaucratic equivalent of getting
a new word into the Oxford Dictionary. Chapter 6 of the
Manual deals with "Action on Receipts". It was
enlarged to include para 32, sub-para 9 which now
reads:
"Notes
and orders will normally be recorded in note sheets
in the Notes Portion of the file and will be
serially numbered. Black or blue ink will be used by
all category of staff and officers. Only an officer of
the level of Joint Secretary to the Government of India and
above may use green or red ink in rare cases."
A good bureaucratic solution, as you would have noticed: discretion allowed but not circumscribed!
And Para 68, sub-para 5 of the Manual of Office Procedures now reads:
"Initial
drafting will be done in black or blue ink.
Modifications in the draft at the subsequent levels
may be made in green or red ink by the offices so as
to distinguish the corrections made."
Another good solution, as you would have noticed:
neither option ruled out; a proper function for each
option. Some ambiguity, of course. Para 32(9) says
that only officers of Joint Secretary level and above may
use red or green ink, and that too only in rare cases. Para
68(5), on the other hand, does not limit the use of these
colours to any particular rank; and it does not say
that the corrections and amendments for which the
colours are used have to be of an especially rare
kind.
Solution?
The two sub-paras are to be, as the courts remind
us, "read harmoniously"! Even then, not all problems
have been solved, I am cons- trained to record.
After all, in view of what the Deputy Director of
the National Archives had pointed out, may it not be that
the ink that is being used by officers does not bear that
ISI mark? |
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