Bureaucratic Subversion

The Bane of New India

When the government steered the Right to Education bill through Parliament, those of us who had fought for it through two decades were pleased. The important thing, however, is how the act would be notified. The language of the bill leaves a lot of gray areas. And well it might because bureaucrats wrote it and they will fully exploit the obfuscation. For example, they will come down heavily on private schools that cater to the poor in urban slums and rural areas and impose impossible conditions that such enterprises simply cannot fulfill.

There are too many vested interests: the government school system; the high-end private schools that have bribed their way into existence and above all, the alternative NGO schools that survive on government subsidies. With such firepower arraigned against it, the RTE bill will go the way of every well-meaning initiative of the government such the NREGA or the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan. The net outcome will be zero. And so everything will come to naught.

If this sounds cynical, then you should listen to my story about a small community on the outskirts of Delhi. This is an upscale community of successful professionals that includes about 30 houses. It is an oasis in the chaos of Delhi, with trees and birdsong. It’s a wonderful community where neighbors meet frequently to have a drink or dinner and to discuss issues of India’s development. The people who live there are respected professionals whose interests span public health, wildlife conservation, media, law and what have you.

The community came into being in the early 1990s. Because it was part of rural Delhi, it was offered no municipal services like water, sanitation or roads, never mind street lighting. Like pioneers, residents made their own arrangements: people built septic tanks, drilled bore wells and got their own garbage collection. Power was an issue until distribution was privatized, when the resident association petitioned the distribution company. Realizing these were high-end customers, the company quickly ensured that power cuts and fluctuations were minimized.

On the roads issue, the resident association petitioned the Delhi government arguing from a taxpayer viewpoint; so the road was built: badly but still motorable. It took several years including the fact that the first allotment of several crores was swallowed by the pirates of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. Now this community faces water a problem because the bore wells have dried up. This is precious real estate but more important it represents the single major investment for most of the residents. Without water, their homes are worth nothing.

The association applied to the Delhi government for permission to drill a community bore well. It seemed a logical and eco-friendly thing to do. But between the local water authority, the local police and several residents who had bribed their way into deepening their bore wells, the application has been kicked around from pillar to post.

So here you have this huge Indian-style standoff: members of the community paid bribes to the water authority and the police to deepen their wells. As a result, other residents found their bore wells running dry. When the association sought to build a community well, some residents and recipients of their bribes in the water authority and the local police struck a dissonant note.

Between corrupt citizens, bureaucrats, police officials and local politicians, this pleasant community is caught in a cleft. It needs the rule of law to be enforced but the local government: the municipality and the police, are locked in various corrupt projects. Residents of the community are not without influence but stand divided because several members, who own houses there, are compromised because the deals they did to buy their houses don’t stand up to scrutiny.

This is a small localized community problem, to be sure. But its implications have a larger footprint. Even though the union government has introduced various enlightened policies, local governance is caught in a medieval time warp. In the matter of schools as well: a sweeping and enlightened law stands to be subverted on the rocks of bad governance. In notifying the RTE act, many activists fear the education bureaucracy will not let private schools for the poor flourish.

Then there is the issue of the RTE-mandated 25 percent quota for poor children in private schools. The vast majority of private schools, however, cater to the poor. So how will the quota be enforced? Clearly, framers of the bill were thinking of the elite private schools with no acknowledgment of the private schools for the poor.

Whether it is the private schools for the poor or the community bore well for the upscale Delhi community, governance is still held hostage to the ideology of the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy lords it over the poor and is prejudiced against the affluent (not rich). In the event, private schools for the poor will be held hostage to the bureaucracy’s prejudice against education as commerce; likewise the South Delhi community must suffer because the bureaucrats of the water authority dismiss it as an “affluent colony” that deserves nothing from the government.

In the end, the admirable RTE bill stands to be subverted by bureaucrats, who oppose all change. Residents of the affluent community will have to fight for their water against the very forces in charge of governance.

An edited version of this article appeared in Education World, June 2010.

Copyright Rajiv Desai 2010

Good Policy

Need Governance

In many ways, the government has embarked on a path breaking route, in terms of both domestic and foreign policy.

To begin with, there is the issue of fertilizer subsidies. In one fell swoop, by targeting subsidies on the basis of nutrients, the government has changed the game. Now farmers will look to nutrients other than urea. This will increase yields dramatically. Urea-based fertilizers were good and government policies championed their use. Over the years, it became clear that they had passed the point of diminishing returns. Everywhere in the world, governments promoted suplhur-based and other nutrients in the mix to increase yields and protect the soil.

With all the noise about food inflation, the government has pointed to the exploitative role of middlemen in the journey that farm products make from the fields to the market. The finance minister made several references to the need for organized retail in the grocery business, most recently at the CII national meeting in Delhi.

Coming to taxes, the finance minister, in his budget speech, cut individual taxes while increasing some indirect levies. The idea is sterling: put more money in the hands of middle class families and let them decide what they can or cannot afford. If I am considering buying a car and it costs a few thousand rupees more, it is my call. By putting economic decisions in the hands of citizens, the government has made a major paradigm shift.

On internal security, the government has made major moves. It has taken on the Maoist movement in central India with force. The most recent incident in Dantewada only underscored the Prime Minister’s six-old assessment that Maoists pose the most significant threat to national security. True, there are complaints of security forces riding roughshod over the militants. But then, Dantewada showed that the Maoists are not known for their grace and diplomacy either. This tough approach seeks not only to contain the insurgents but to send a clear message that this is a hard government that will not stomach violent agitations.

On the national security front, the government has embarked on a new course. While initiating talks with Pakistan, it authorized a major Air Force exercise in the desert of Rajasthan to demonstrate its fighting capabilities. It was a brilliant move to invite most defense attaches of diplomatic missions and to leave out the representatives of China and Pakistan. The idea clearly was to exhibit hard power.

To reinforce the government’s hard line, the Prime Minister went to Saudi Arabia and urged the authorities there to weigh in with Pakistan to control the various terrorist groups that operate from there. It’s clear the Pakistan government has neither the wherewithal nor the will to reign in various terrorist groups that have a free run within its borders. A Saudi nudge could go a long way to boost the crippled Zardari government and the rogue elements within its army and the intelligence agency.

The emphasis on infrastructure is a key feature aspect of the government’s priorities. Roads, ports, airports, railroads are being built. The trouble is that corrupt and inept government agencies are in charge and its users are citizens, who lack civic consciousness. Thus it gets caught up in the bottlenecks caused by lackadaisical enforcement and scofflaw citizens.

Many cities now have modern airports; they are like white elephants because the minute you step outside there is total chaos. It’s the same thing for the highways. We recently traveled to Chandigarh from Delhi. The road is a work in progress and there are significant flyovers and wide pavements. But there is total traffic chaos. Even as you rev to the top speed of 90 kilometers an hours, you find yourself having to deal with vehicles going the wrong way, underpowered trucks, three-wheeled vehicles, bullock carts, cycle rickshaws, handcarts, herds of cows and sheep and scariest of all, daredevil pedestrians trying to cross the highway. There is simply no policing, no signage or any other accoutrements that go with modern highways. It’s almost as though modern amenities are made available to people with a medieval mindset.

Tragedy is the police have no authority to enforce the law. Even worse, they don’t even know the law. Just recently, I stopped a police car on the spanking new expressway that connects Delhi and Gurgaon to the airports. I told the police officer that the unchecked use of the expressway by two- and three-wheeled vehicles was a major traffic violation. I told him there were signs that these vehicles were not allowed. He told me to mind my own business. The government needs also to show its hard self here as much as it is doing with the Maoists in central India.

In the end, you have a modernizing government that is beset by a crude political class, a malignant bureaucracy and a pre-modern citizenry. As such, even though the government pursues enlightened policies, the ship of state seems to be caught on the rocks of casteism, communalism and corruption.

Bureaucrats blame crass politicians and the ignorant citizenry. Politicians castigate the bureaucracy. Citizens berate politicians and bureaucrats. It’s a sort of beggar-thy-neighbor view that enables the entire system to elude responsibility. If everyone’s to blame, then nobody is accountable.

This is the challenge for India that the world deems as an up and coming power.

An edited version of this article appeared in The Times of India, April 21, 2010

Copyright Rajiv Desai 2010

RTE: The Devil in the Detail

Parliament recently passed the Right to Education act that is intended to provide universal and compulsory education for children from eight to 14. For those of us who have been in the vanguard of this nearly two decades long effort, passage of the act was a historic vindication. In the early 1990s, UNICEF led the effort to convince lawmakers that universal and compulsory primary education was India’s ticket out of poverty. As adviser to the resident representative, I helped develop an advocacy campaign to reach members of parliament, business leaders, members of the academy and journalists.

With evident satisfaction, I looked closer at the act and found there were several problems that could complicate the implementation of this admirable initiative of the UPA government. There are the usual issues of definition; plus, there are plenty of grey areas that could subvert its intent. In the end, the goals of this laudable law could become obscured and it could degenerate into a tangle of rent-seeking opportunities for bureaucrats and politicians.

Thus in section 12, the bill mandates that schools “shall admit in class I, to the extent of at least twenty-five per cent of the strength of that class, children belonging to (the) weaker section and disadvantaged group in the neighborhood and provide free and compulsory elementary education till its completion." Here’s the problem with this otherwise beneficent provision: who will define the “weaker section and disadvantaged group in the neighborhood?” It has the potential of turning into slippery scams like BPL cards and ration cards.

The act goes on to say that the school in question “shall be reimbursed expenditure so incurred by it to the extent of per-child-expenditure incurred by the State, or the actual amount charged from the child, whichever is less." According to most estimates, the government spends less than 3,000 rupees per child per annum or about 250 rupees a month. According to the government’s own NREGA scheme, the minimum wage is 100 rupees per day for 100 days a year. That’s the rub: if the government can pay 10,000 rupees a year to help a rural laborer keep his body and soul together, why is it so miserly when it comes to primary school children?

These are but two examples of how the devil in the detail could sabotage a noble-minded effort. There are other such minefields in the draft that the small band of officials who are transcribing the act into law ought to be aware of and ensure that the notified law closes all possible loopholes. As such, the new law will overcome the threat of poor draftsmanship. It is important to abide by the letter, yes; but it is crucial to uphold the spirit of the RTE act. However, some of the spirit behind the act may already be vitiated. In framing the new law, the government may have left itself open to the charge of bureaucratic thinking.

Accordingly, the universe of primary schools is divided into several categories: the first broad distinction being government and private schools. Then, it further subdivides the former into the category of ordinary schools and “special schools like Kendriya Vidyalaya, Sainik School, Navodaya School, etc.” Under the provisions of the act, these special schools will be subject to Section 12, which mandates that at least 25 percent of students admitted in class I must be from the weaker sections.

In the government’s thinking, private schools also come in several avatars: aided and unaided, recognized and unrecognized. The biggest chunk of students can be found in the “unrecognized” category. These are essentially private schools based in urban slums and rural outposts; stepchildren of the government dominated education system, simply because they are for-profit private ventures run by entrepreneurs focused the “weaker sections” of urban slum dwellers and rural poor.

The notion that only the government can provide education and other services for the poor is an outdated concept, dating back to the colonial raj. It is a relic of the “white man’s burden,” a cousin of racism and imperialism. In making government recognition the touchstone of its education policy, lawmakers in India simply perpetuate the colonial tradition of imperial government and missionary charity. For all the names of cities and streets they change to demonstrate their anti-colonial credentials, the ruling elites are nevertheless inheritors of the white man’s burden.

Socialism, central planning, nonalignment were all part of the same burden. Today the economy and foreign policy are largely directed by the public interest; the economy has been broadly privatized; foreign policy is free from ideological blinkers. However, as the RTE act shows, the social sector is still not free. This is not a blanket call to privatize education but an argument that policymakers consider the ground reality: commercial schools are a reality even among the poor population. Instead of trying to shackle them with unattainable requirements for recognition, the government needs to help them serve their students and communities better.

In fact, the government needs to create an environment in which all forms of schools flourish. The challenge of primary education needs all hands on deck: private and government schools for the affluent as well for the “weaker sections.” The RTE act could serve as a deterrent to unrecognized private schools that serve the poor. The group of officials charged with making rules and regulations based on the act would do well to scrap the onerous criteria private schools must fulfill for government recognition and tighten instead vigilance over qualitative issues such as curricula and teacher training.

At a recent event, a senior official in the HRD ministry told the assembled audience that the 2009 RTE act would do for the education sector what the reforms of 1991 did for the economy. It is certainly true that RTE act is broad and sweeping in scope and could indeed achieve that. The devil is in the detail.


An edited version of this article appeared in Education World, February 2010.

Copyright Rajiv Desai 2010