I am a senior journalist and have worked in several states besides covering assignments for my media in many states and at the Center. I am constrained to say that I say with my own eyes how the bureaucrats are treated shabbily by their political masters and I will not advise any one remotely related to me to aspire to become an IAS or IPS officer.
Bureaucrats in some states are forced to touch the feet of their political bosses to keep them happy since they write their annual CRs I am told that IAS and IPS officers have their forums at state and national levels.I like many of you wonder why they keep mum when some officers of their cadre are inhumanly treated .
You may be more knowledgeable about me .And hence, I ask you if you will advise your academically brilliant daughters and sons to become bureaucrats to be treated like slaves ? Please do not accuse me of creating rift between political class and bureaucrats. They do have an important role to play in serving the people.What I EMPHASIZE IS THAT THERE SHOULD BE A CODE OF CONDUCT ON THE DAY TO DAY FUNCTIONING AND RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE TWO IMPORTANT STAKEHOLDERS FOR THE TRANSPARENT AND SMOOTH FUNCTIONING OF OUR DEMOCRATIC WAY OF LIFE.
On 17 July 2015 at 11:24, Vidyut <wide.aware@gmail.com> wrote:
There are problems with the IAS, there are problems with politicians. Alas, controlling each other is rarely about public interest. Perhaps I am cynical, but I don't think there are any magic fixes. Boring as it seems without a quick pill, I think it is going to take alert citizens relentlessly demanding accountability, scrutinizing and curbing every wrong that comes to light.I think people consider the government or bureaucracy more like a service that ought to be perfect or you will call up customer service. Alas, in a democracy, the final boss is the citizen and it may be like herding cats, but in the end of the day, they will have to keep an eye on their employees and reward, punish or remove as necessary.The most important thing is to mobilize people. Not go one morcha or andolan or against one bad guy, but in the spirit of vigilant and involved management of their own country.Perfection is a convenient mirage that allows people to shruf off their own role on the stage. The only hope is continuous improvement.VidyutVidyutOn Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 10:19 AM, Jagjit Ahuja <jagjit.ahuja@gmail.com> wrote:You may like to go through the appended write up written by an IAS officer . Though it is long but worth reading .I have read every word but found that he has not analyzed as to who has been responsible for bringing such a state of affair of our country.It is my feeling that the so called Steel Frame of the country, the bureaucratic set up is responsible . This gets confirmed when we analyze working of our governing system after independence. It has been the bureaucrats who kept on grabbing all the powers by be-fooling both the politicians and the public by twisting the rules to meet the requirements of the people whom they wanted to help.Such a situation would have never creeped in our governing system had they been fair to all with the authority and the powers they were enjoying .All these years the Joint Secretary of a Ministry is considered as the Government.Please advise if I am wrong in my analyses.Brig J S AhujaOn Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 11:17 AM, Harbhajan Singh <indiaresists@lists.riseup.net> wrote:My Dear Gaur,How are you?I wonder if this topic is discussed in the NDC!!!!!We require Administrative and political reforms. But dear Gaur all the Governments are being managed by the IAS!!! Does any one think IAS would let any such reforms take place and above all be implemented!! Just look at OROP case!!!We need a military/Presidential take over for two years in which the agenda should be administrative and political reforms and then hand over the reigns back to the new dispensation. I agree it is an Utopian idea but if we need to achieve some thing such ideas have to come up.My considered view is that India is going to go down the drain and China-Pak combine will subjugate us in a decade or two may be. Things on the ground for common people including our types are very bad indeed and deteriorating fast.Harbhajan SinghLt Gen
From: Gaur J K <gaurjk@hotmail.com>
To: "indiaresists@lists.riseup.net" <indiaresists@lists.riseup.net>
Sent: Tuesday, 14 July 2015 3:26 PM
Subject: RE: [IAC#RG] It's time to shut the IAS down
13/7/15Yes, but will it not be a piece-meal change?Our whole system of governance is based on the colonial british model.Our judicial system is based on the same.Our laws are based on the same. Some laws are as old as 1860 just after it was taken over by the Imperial power.
Our Constitution is primarily drawing upon the British Model.Yet the realisation that changes are needed in the institutions of Governance should lead to the desired changes sooner or later.Hiring of experts/advisors outside the IAS system could be one way to dilute their dominance. Mr. Modi seems to have realised and doing so in some areas.JKGaur
From: dhiranil@hotmail.com
To: indiaresists@lists.riseup.net
Date: Sun, 12 Jul 2015 23:15:59 +0530
Subject: [IAC#RG] It's time to shut the IAS down
Forwarding as received, for it makes a lot of sense, sharing this article specially with those among us, who love welfare of our Society, our Armed Forces, and above all, our country as a whole. It is an open fact that they are also the creator of the problem that is existing and around the widely known subject matter as OROP issue !Anil Dhir
Date: Sun, 12 Jul 2015 19:34:09 +0530
Subject: Fwd: It's time to shut the IAS down
From:
To:It's time to shut the IAS down
( A forward as received)
Last updated on: June 08, 2015 13:17 ISTThe IAS distrusts outsiders bringing change, the product of being a tenured cadre; it worships authority rather than citizenship, the legacy of being lackeys of the Queen-Emperor -- and it admires itself above all, for no reason that the rest of us can discern. Mihir S Sharma explains.If Prime Minister Narendra Modi fails to live up to the expectations that he has raised, it will not be entirely his fault.After all, he has moderated his promises.The shining vision of India's future he outlined in early 2014 has been replaced by the -- still inspiring -- set of aspirations listed in the 2015 Budget.A house for everyone by 2022, with 24-hour power, clean drinking water, a road and modern sanitation; one job per family, medical and skilling facilities close by, and much else of that nature.You cannot fault his targets, and you cannot fault his energy.If he seems to have little idea of how to get there, well, he was never asked for such details about implementation on the campaign trail, so it's a little late to complain now.The problem is that he is trying to drive the country to these oh-so-distant targets by 2022, but he still has the same old car with which to do it.Today, in the middle of 2015, it is doubly, triply, quadruply clear that changing the driver was not enough -- the driver was never the biggest, the realest problem. The real problem is the car.Modi might have the will, the energy, the sincerity and the ambition. But unless he fundamentally changes the system that implements his will, that realises his ambition, he is doomed to fail.And that system is the Indian government and its bureaucracy. I want you to pause for a moment to think, as objectively as you can, about how farcical it is.We, the world's fastest-growing economy and its largest democracy, have a state structure basically unchanged from the extractive system set up to rule a vast, pastoral country on behalf of a distant island nation.We have a twice-born bureaucracy that holds so much power.Why? Because they are the happy inheritors of a system in which civil servants would have been loyal to Queen and Whitehall, but ministers may have been dangerously nationalist -- and thus needed to be easily vetoed or blocked.We still have a tenured, generalist civil service, organised on Victorian public-school principles, even as our economy and governance become fiendishly more complex.Every single foreign investor, foreign do-gooder, foreign diplomat, is astounded by both the intelligence of their Indian bureaucratic interlocutor and their -- much of the time -- complete and utter ignorance of the issues at hand.What else can you expect?The person having to deal with FIIs today may have been dealing with water harvesting yesterday.No matter how high your rank in a deadly dull competitive examination in the early 1980s, you will not handle that transition seamlessly.It is natural, therefore, that you take no risks and show no imagination; you are, after all, always a step behind those you are regulating or governing.It is less natural that you are incredibly arrogant even while being that step behind. (Or to suppose that anyone else in government being paid more than you would be a colossal, extraordinary insult to the Indian Republic, equivalent to Bangladesh annexing most of Eastern India. Imagine if a tax expert or a lawyer was hired from the private sector and paid more than the Cabinet Secretary! The whole edifice of government would collapse! Anarchy would rule! Four southern states would sink into the sea! Etc, etc)We have an un-fire-able, unaccountable civil service, which can screw up as much as it likes -- consider, for example, the monumental error that was the FII-MAT (minimum alternate tax) imbroglio -- and still will face no consequences.This is the largest cause of the institutionalised mediocrity that holds this country back. Even promotions are largely dependent on seniority and not record; nobody would run any other organisation thus, but it's OK to run a complicated, under-governed country like this?Ah, we are told, but insulating administrators is necessary to ensure they are not subject to politicisation -- to ensure they are "independent".This laughable claim can only be the product of wilfully refusing to actually read even one newspaper headline over the past 20 years.Who can claim that bureaucrats are not politicised, given contemporary history? How many have simply refused to sign what they are supposed to? There are some such glorious names, but vanishingly few.Combine these three factors, and you have a government machinery that is unaccountable, under-informed, and all-powerful. It lacks creativity. It automatically stifles innovation (witness the colossal idiocy underlying its shutdown of Uber in the capital).There is no alternative but to shut these people down. Root-and-branch reform, beginning with an end to the imperial-era privileges of the Indian Administrative Service.The IAS distrusts outsiders bringing change, the product of being a tenured cadre; it worships authority rather than citizenship, the legacy of being lackeys of the Queen-Emperor -- and it admires itself above all, for no reason that the rest of us can discern.The prime minister, sadly, agrees with that.He, too, seems to imagine that his transformative promises can be operationalised and implemented by the same people who have failed us for 70 years.His first action on entering 7, Race Course Road, was to tell the secretaries to the Union that they could speak to him directly, cutting out their ministers.Subsequently he took over all appointments. This is in a way natural; when Modi was appointed chief minister of Gujarat, he had no experience of -- or history of interest in -- policy.Guess who he turned to? Perhaps that's why the bureaucrats other Indians see as obstructive, backward-looking monuments to institutional arrogance are seen by our prime minister as gentle tutors in the art of governance.This is a pity, since the only way he will actually transform India is by first transforming its hopelessly out-of-date government.Actually, if Prime Minister Narendra Modi fails to live up to the expectations that he has raised, it will be entirely his fault. He should have started by ending the IAS.
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