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Journalism of Courage
At the rate they are being transferred, a bureaucrat in Uttar Pradesh may soon know more about the intricacies of packing suitcases than they do the district or department they are meant to serve. So thoroughly politicised have the administrative services become in the country’s largest state that senior members of the state bureaucracy and police are constantly forced to trim their professional sails to the winds blowing in from Lucknow.
Chief ministers, on their part, have discovered how to wield the carrots and sticks of high office. While there is nothing as effective as the threat of transfers to beat the babus into a state of permanent submission, “deserving” officers, or rather those who do the bidding of their political masters without demurring, are suitably rewarded with remunerative postings.
Take Uttar Pradesh’s record on this score. While Mulayam Singh moved 814 bureaucrats in his stint in the early ’90s, Mayawati made 1,380 of them dance to her tune in the six months she ruled the state in 1997, and Kalyan Singh has not done too badly himself since coming to power last September.
To date, 980 babus have been transferred by him and the number would have been much higher if the code of conduct covering elections to last year’s panchayat polls and this year’s Lok Sabha hadn’t cramped his style somewhat. These acts of deliberate dislocation seem almost illogical, even patently wrong, in a state that is chronically in the red and in urgent need of all the administrative acumen it can garner given its miserable human development indicators.
The bureaucracy in India was conceived as a steel frame that would serve the people well even in times of politicalinstability and crisis. One of the attributes of a steel frame is its relative permanence. While some amount of cadre mobility is required to bring new insights and a fresh approach to administration and experience in dealing with a myriad problem to its officers, men and women who are constantly on the hop can hardly be expected to nurse a constituency or see an important project through.
In fact, several well-meaning developmental programmes, like the National Literacy Mission for instance, have been seriously crippled by the fact that the district magistrates who first initiated them in a particular region and had a stake in seeing them take root, were themselves prematurely uprooted. People’s confidence in the system is severely undermined in the process.
Chief Minister Kalyan Singh does not really need to be told all this. After all, wasn’t it his government that had prepared a detailed policy statement which specified that not more than 15 per cent of the total administrative cadre under any servicewould be transferred annually? But then who says policy intentions need to become policy?
