Economy and Efficiency in Public Administration in India

Summary

C. S. Venkatachar’s 1963 Forum of Free Enterprise pamphlet diagnoses what he calls a ‘pronounced maladjustment of Government and politics with the administration’ in the seventeenth year of Independence. Writing from the vantage point of a retired senior civil servant who had served as Secretary to the President of India, he distinguishes the old, manageable, two-person financial corruption of the colonial bureaucracy from a new structural corruption — a rot in the public morals of the ruling elite that, in his Turkish-proverb phrase, ‘rots from head downwards’ and prostitutes the administrative machinery to factional ends. He traces this rot to the statism unleashed by the 1952 turn to state trading, controls, licensing and bulk-buying of foodstuffs, compounded by a politically unreformed Congress party that finds it convenient to browbeat and hollow out the Civil Service rather than govern through it.

The pamphlet’s second movement borrows R. H. S. Crossman’s recent essay on Walter Bagehot to argue that India, like post-war Britain, has drifted from Cabinet Government to Prime Ministerial Government. The pre-existing centralised administrative machine, Venkatachar writes, fitted itself effortlessly around the Prime Minister, with the result — quoting Crossman — that ‘loyalty has become the supreme virtue and independence of thought a dangerous adventure.’ He follows the maladjustment down the escalator from the Centre to the district, where the Collector is reduced to factional politics with the Zila Parishad chairman and the Block Development Officer becomes a pawn of the Panchayat Samiti President. The Benthamite military-style hierarchy on which the Indian administrative system was built has collapsed, he argues, into ‘non-accountability in the chain of command’ and a collapse of internal discipline.

Against this Venkatachar offers no policy therapy. The remedy, he insists, is moral: India still possesses a ‘liberal, radical tradition’ that is the moral heir to nineteenth-century philosophic radicalism, and reviving dissident opinion is the only counterpoise to the ‘authoritarian forces of the present one-party State.’ Quoting Pasternak and John Strachey on the spent appeal of communist totalitarianism, and closing with Arthur Koestler’s borrowing of the Alcoholics Anonymous serenity prayer, he frames moral courage — not better planning — as the indispensable condition for genuine economy and efficiency in public administration.

Key points

• Venkatachar frames his theme as the ‘pronounced maladjustment’ between Indian politics and administration in the seventeenth year of Independence, and treats administration — not policy — as the only instrument by which national aims can be achieved.

• He distinguishes the old, two-party, manageable financial corruption of the colonial bureaucracy from a new structural corruption that ‘rots from head downwards’, spreading from the political elite into the social hierarchy and prostituting the administrative machinery.

• He attributes the post-Independence rise of corruption to the statism unleashed by the 1952 turn to state trading, controls, licensing and bulk-buying, compounded by a politically unreformed ruling party that browbeat the Civil Service rather than reform itself.

• Adapting R. H. S. Crossman’s reading of Walter Bagehot, he argues that India has practised Prime Ministerial Government rather than Cabinet Government, producing ‘an immense accretion of power to the Prime Minister’ and reducing ministers to his agents.

• He documents the maladjustment cascading to Panchayati Raj, where the Collector is dragged into factional politics with the Zila Parishad chairman and the Block Development Officer becomes a pawn of the Panchayat Samiti President.

• The Benthamite military-style chain of command on which the Indian administrative system was built has, in his diagnosis, collapsed into non-accountability and the disappearance of individual initiative under one-party dominance.

• He invokes a ‘liberal, radical tradition’ surviving in India — the moral heir to nineteenth-century philosophic radicalism — and calls for dissident opinion and dissident groups as a counterpoise to the authoritarian one-party State.

• Closing with Pasternak, John Strachey on the failure of Communist means, and Arthur Koestler’s Alcoholics Anonymous serenity prayer, he frames moral courage rather than policy reform as the precondition for economy and efficiency in public administration.