Cost of Corporatization of Bureaucracy

My close encounter with bureaucracy began in late 2009, when I was invited onto the Rural Development working committee of the Tamil Nadu State Planning Commission. It paused on 1st November last year. A few weeks before that, partner remarked that I had started to sound too much like the Government and needed a detox from “the System”. A Government retreat in the last week of October settled it:  where I watched the key issues discussed in huddle and mediocre ideas occupied mainstage. I called my exit a “sabbatical” for couple of months and kept extending it, a couple of months at a time. A year on, partner pointed out this morning that a sabbatical implies you mean to go back, and you don’t seem to be in any mood to do so, she is right. I haven’t even peripherally dealt with the government during this time, the announcements or schemes of the departments I worked with don’t interest me any longer, and I don’t miss any of it. This article is not about my sabbatical, it is more to do with reflecting on the status of the government machinery, that we call bureaucracy - and the biggest trend I saw growing within this system during the time I have been most actively engaged with it. 

 Until the turn of the century, governments set the standard that other institutions aspired to. In 2000 I walked into the office of a prominent NGO founded by IRMA graduates and was struck by how bureaucratic it was. Procedure, norms, convention, hierarchy and proper channels ruled. NGOs, academia and even the private sector aspired to the bureaucracy’s “institutional model,” and often resembled it. The IT boom changed that. Large IT companies mushroomed around Y2K, and over the next decade corporate culture reshaped every corner of professional India, including the government’s institutional model. It changed everything from office layout and aesthetics to staff appraisal and executives’ cars. Much of this was layered on top of existing privileges, especially those of top officials. Some of them now combine the hierarchical entitlements of a feudal lord, the powers of a colonial master and the perks of a modern corporate executive.

In keeping with the theme, I summarize my observations of the process of corporatization and how it impacts the bureaucracy as corporate bullet points:

• Targets without pathways. Bureaucrats were given corporate marketing-style targets with no clear route to meeting them. Some were buried under work. Others got away with little or no clarity about what was expected of them, mostly those who ran personal errands for senior officials or were the Minister’s men / women. A senior IAS officer who initiated several structural changes as Secretary for Rural Development, when I met him after being transferred said, "If I had stayed awhile longer, I would have de-coupled performance from achieving targets, we need to do that to get credible data". 
• Resources by rank, not need. Unlike a corporate where function defines access to resources, in the government, the highest officer must have the costliest phone, laptop, printer, scanner, even toilet paper. Resources followed hierarchy rather than any assessment of need. So one person had the high-end machines while another had the job of delivering with whatever they had. I have so many stories here - from the Forest Department higher officials who wanted to visit Africa for a programme meant for foresters, to the Senior IAS officer who once asked me for an invite from a German University, to the prioritizing of "exposure visit" destinations as closer to un-visited tourist places as possible.
• One-size appraisals. Though Governments too have adopted KRA and KPIs, most performance is reviewed on generic parameters. People facing very different challenges are judged by the same criteria. Local knowledge and local problems count for nothing; all that is credited is the individual’s competence in managing them. Once I got an opportunity to witness a review meeting of a rural women subsidized moped distribution meeting, where a district officer was expressing a genuine challenge that women in hilly terrain do not prefer a scooter and hence the low uptake of the scheme and the reviewing IAS officer compared her performance to the person seating next to her from the plains and blamed her for coming up with poor excuse. This is just an example.   
• Automation by budget, not design. Workplaces were automated according to budget constraints rather than system planning. There is hardly any system wide data flow understanding by the designers, often it is either dictated by the higher official or designed with a theoretical understanding. At the point of entry, data is handled on low budgets and poorly secured. At the higher reporting levels, it can be manipulated by design. Together these make the data unreliable and sometimes irrelevant. Decisions, important ones are made on such data, that's the irony. In one of my first planning commission meetings, when I found most discussions were around opinions and sought some data to back-up one such opinion, the IAS officer seated next to me commented, 'you know government data, we set targets and then make reports to show we have achieved them, if you have any independent study or data on the subject please share, we will go with that'! 
• The cooking contest. When officers who performed well on paper were rewarded and promoted, even sincere officers began fudging papers to show performance. Government performance data is often driven by the gap between the target and the reported achievement. The smaller the gap, the bigger the reward, and everyone joins the cooking contest. Late evening, as I was leaving the rural livelihoods department, heard a junior officer over phone instructing the district official as to within what range can they claim they have under-performed! I have seen the same with health department as well and time and again pointed out that the point of aggregation of data cannot be the point of accountability for the same data. 
• Arrogance by proximity. Closeness to unaccountable power breeds a rare arrogance that assumes all powers everywhere. The filing system is still colonial and is being digitized only hesitantly, yet files can vanish in a jiffy. Institutional memory can be created or wiped out at will. Waiting for a meeting with a senior official once, I saw him heavily criticize a junior official in his department for making a file and in front of his colleagues, destroy the physical file. I have also been told that files can be created to retrofit hiring a certain contractor or anyone, including minutes of meetings and other communication. Some of the manual procedures are explicitly designed for such "margins of manipulation" to be available.  
• Dashboards that outrun delivery. Marketing-style live dashboards became the government’s measure of service delivery. But how fast they had to be updated was never matched to the actual quality of the service. There have been so many instances of people having to 'deliver' a target being prioritized over doing a good job, from poor quality infrastructure that never is put to use to photoshopped images for online impact, everything goes to comply with the dashboard. Once reviewing an agricultural programme, I was handed over the visitor's list for a technology pilot site as the total number of people adopting the said technology because that number brought them closer to the target to be achieved!   
• Dashboards that arrive too late. With no transparency, contracts take so long to award that these dashboards often go live after the project they were meant to serve has ended.  I saw a multi-lateral funded project that started off with the ambitious goal of having all its reports only done through a robust backed IT infrastructure, change 2 contractors and eventually by the time all the data was fed and it went live, the project had about 6 months to closure.
• Appraisal without appeal. The reporting officer reviews performance and there is no proper way to raise a grievance. That leaves the subordinate entirely at the officer’s disposal and obliged to meet all their demands. Many of these demands are well known; some are so repulsive they are rarely spoken of.  Once someone asked a OA to actually dance for a random music within their chamber, at another time the DTP operator was asked to perform all design work for the business of the bureaucrats wife, in another instance the bureaucrat sent a junior officer to assist shopping for a family wedding. 
• Transfers and inherited blame. Transfers are frequent and can be influenced by any number of factors. An officer by the mere act of owning up to the role, can therefore be evaluated, reviewed or held accountable for a job someone else did badly. In a new posting, officers often disown existing programmes, projects and initiatives mainly to protect themselves. In one instance, the rural development department had set-up a shop in a prominent location in a district towards the end of a project. As there were some complaints about financial mis-handling of the venture, the new department that was handed over the shop refused to do anything with it until the enquiry was over, thereby jeopardizing the sales potential of rural women SHG products for which the shop was set-up to begin with, by the time the enquiry was over the shop was dilapidated and now awaits next capital infusion to commence operations, meanwhile the products SHG women make struggle to find markets in the same district. 

From technological intervention to HR processes to marketing and management tactics, corporate learnings have been haphazardly integrated into the government system and processes over the last couple of decades. Every one of these reforms was sold as efficiency, yet each one pulled the officials further from the citizen and closer to the spreadsheet. I have only cited a few examples for each but have a lot more for every point made above, have given sample here to keep this short. Where services do look exemplary, it is despite these bureaucratic constraints. That gap between what is reported and what is real is where I have worked mostly: Reflecting back today, I realized that in most cases I have helped departments build systems that serve the public first and the dashboard second.