Bureaucratic Reforms

» System for Public Grievance is indeed working

Government of India has an online Grievance forum at http://www.pgportal.gov.in/ and you should not be surprised that logging in a complaint is indeed effective.

The govt. wants people to use this tool to highlight the problems they face while dealing with Government officials or departments like Passport Office, Electricity board, BSNL/MTNL, Railways etc.

We keep complaining about things not working in India. Couple of months back, Faridabad Municipal Corporation laid new roads in a certain area and the local residents were very happy about it. But, two weeks later, BSNL dug up the newly laid roads to install new cables which annoyed all the residents. A resident used the above listed grievance forum to highlight his concern. To his surprise, BSNL and Municipal Corporation of Faridabad were served a show cause notice and the complainant received a copy of the notice in one week. Government has asked the MC and BSNL about the goof up as it is clear that both the government departments were not in synchronisation at all.

So use this grievance forum and educate others who don't know about this facility. This way we can at least raise our concerns instead of just talking about the 'System failure' in India.

» Is Virappa Moily committee on the right track for reforming bureaucracy?

Central Government set up the Second Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC) under Mr. Veerappa Moily (ex-chief minister of Karnataka) for recommending a set of measures for reforming the India’s infamous bureaucracy. Mr. Moily has submitted ten reports proposing a number of changes. However, all these measures fall short of what should be the real remedy for reforming India’s bureaucracy for the emerging decades. First of all, in any reform process, we must evolve models and choose the best model for reforms. There are a number of approaches for dealing with the subject of bureaucratic reforms.

First is the organisational prospective model, which should look at the organisational architecture, structure, systems and procedures, culture and compensation and other issues. Here the assumption is that if the organisation is set in order by touching upon all the elements as stated above, there would be an automatic improvement in the delivery of services by the bureaucratic institution. The second approach is to touch upon the subject matter from the perspective of delivery of services to the citizens/ customers/ other service recipients. This can be called a delivery or goal-oriented approach, where the focus is on the results that the bureaucratic institution is supposed to deliver. The third approach could be a systems approach, or a ‘360 degree approach’, where everything from organisation to the final delivery of services is examined and changes wherever required are recommended. In the fourth approach, the traditional bureaucracy as defined by Weber, (the famous sociologist) conceptually shifts to a managerial and leadership approach of modern management. In nutshell, bureaucracy is treated more like a modern corporation, albeit a not profit modern corporation and all the elements of bureaucratic institution is designed in accordance with principles of modern management. In this approach, there will be a convergence between the bureaucratic enterprise and any modern corporation. This is also an attractive approach, particularly in the light of the recent happenings which has proved that the government and public sector has a strong role to play in society and economy and hence they must be made more efficient and effective in order to meet the future challenges.

It is not known whether Moily Commission adopted any systematic approach to reforming the bureaucracy. It appears from the reports submitted by him so far to the government that the entire gamut of issues are being dealt with and conclusions arrived at in a haphazard manner without first of all deciding on the principles and methodologies to be used for drawing an architecture for future reforms, which should have been the first and foremost requirement. This seems to have been missed out entirely.
(Further, comments would appear in the forthcoming issues.)

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