Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar

We have converted the greatest asset of the British legacy -- the steel frame of administration -- into a most unrepresentative, irresponsible and unresponsive master of the people

Simultaneously, district and subdistrict administration should be entrusted to a district administrative service for each district, recruited and controlled by the Panchayati Raj and nagarpalika institutions, transfers being at worst from one village or town of any one district to another within the same district.

Politicians would soon find that there is no great danger to the officer in being shifted 20 to 30 miles from one point to another. There is such a qualitative difference between being frequently shuffled around a district to being transferred from, say, Gorakhpur to Agra, then Jhansi to Pilibhit, all within the same year, that the threat of transfer would cease to be the protection money extorted by politicians for bureaucratic subservience.

The transformation of the generalist administrative cadre into a state secretariat service under the state government and field administrative service under the panchayats/nagarpalikas would open the way to a similar transformation of the staffing pattern of the line departments, the two most notorious of which, in most state government, are the PWD and the education department.

Through the threat of transfer and the blandishment of supplementary sources of under-the-table compensation for low rates of pay, state politicians have converted the key functions of physical infrastructure and human resource development into lucrative banks of personal revenue collection.

There is no accountability or responsibility to the nominal beneficiaries of the PWD and primary/secondary education -- the great unwashed people of India. Every other line department has followed the example of the politician-engineer-contractor and politician-teacher nexus. We have thus converted the greatest asset of the British legacy -- the steel frame -- into a most unrepresentative, irresponsible and unresponsive master of the people and servant of the politicians.

We can have a responsive administration only if it is representative of the voter, responsible to the electorate, and, therefore, responsive to the people, pace Rajiv Gandhi (see his speech to the district magistrates workshop, Jaipur, April 30, 1988). That is the premise and the promise of the 1992 amendments to the Constitution relating to the panchyats and nagarpalikas.

Instead of basing the Pay Commission recommendations on this fundamental paradigm shift in administration, Justice Pandian and his colleagues have contented themselves with burdening Chidambaram with an additional annual bill of Rs 95 billion merely for administering the administration.

Anything which adds to Chidambaram's woes is, of course, to be welcomed -- his treachery to the memory of the man who conceived the 1992 Constitution amendments demands no less. But delivering Chidambaram his richly-deserved comeuppance cannot be a the expense of compelling the good people of India to shell out vast additional sums for being subjected to more of the same callous indifference and motivated oppression that the instruments of governance have, in their generality, come to represent to the people at large.

The celebration of the golden jubilee of our Independence demands a decisive break with the past. We need to go back to Gandhiji's dream. Gandhiji's vision, Gandhiji's model. Administration ergo, remuneration for administration -- must be remodelled to the requirements of a congeries of self-governing village republics, whose public servants are of the people, are recruited by the people and work for the people. That is what will translate independence for the country into freedom for our people. Pandian's report makes no contribution to that great goal. We need a golden jubilee commission on responsive administration.

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