Thursday, March 28, 2013

The long march from Administration to Ministration; An Exercise to Fruition?

The past two Decades have seen many Social Initiatives being taken up by Bureaucrats, both current and former. But as is Evidenced Empirically, it’s a tough Jump for these Administrators to Finally end up making a Positive mark on Society, leave alone be Considered as Social Transformational agents...

According to a survey conducted by Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy, India’s bureaucracy is the worst in Asia. Ranked as the least efficient, the report said that the country’s civil service is a “slow and painful process”. India obtained a score of 9.4 on a scale of 10 where 10 indicates the worst. The survey also said that the bureaucratic red-tape is a serious problem in India and China. The Economist put out a classic synopsis of the civil servants in India in 2008, quoting, “India has some of the hardest-working bureaucrats in the world, but its administration has an abysmal record of serving the public... Indeed, all [of] India’s administration is inefficient.”

Expectably so, today, if one were to ask a citizen to rank those change agents that had the power to transform the civil society positively, bureaucrats would be ranked pitifully low, if ranked at all. But as strangely and paradoxically, many of the biggest transformations in our civil society have occurred because of individual bureaucrats, current or former.

One such example is this woman who obtained a Masters degree in Political Science followed by a Ph.D in Social Sciences from IIT, New Delhi. She went on to join the Indian Police Service as the country’s first woman IPS officer; she finally retired as the Director General, Bureau of Police Research and Development, Ministry of Home Affairs – that’s Dr. Kiran Bedi for you, one of the winners of the 2011 Bharatiya Manavata Vikas Puraskar (see award details in a related story in this issue), who was more of a social activist throughout her career than just a powerful bureaucrat (remember the sobriquet ‘Crane Bedi’?). She now runs an NGO called Navjyoti, which promotes welfare policing and has managed to bring substantial changes in many individuals through its initiatives in areas like education, women empowerment, family counselling, rural and urban development, health, HIV/AIDS and environment.

Similarly, this woman joined the Indian Administrative Service only to bid adieu in less than six years and devoted herself to social activism. With her organisation Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, which functions in rural Rajasthan, she raised her voice for the enforcement of the RTI. The receiver of Magsaysay Award, 2000, Aruna Roy, currently a member of the NAC, has devotedly worked for the rural poor.

Again, this 1968 born man and IIT Kharagpur graduate joined Tata Steel to gain invaluable professional and corporate experience. And then, he joined the Indian Revenue Service and got a prestigious posting at the Income Tax Commissioner’s Office in New Delhi... only to give it all up four years later to start an organisation called ‘Parivartan’ to successfully stir a revolution in the country – a revolution related to what we know as the RTI Act. Meet former bureaucrat and present social activist Arvind Kejriwal who received the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay award in August 2006.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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