the reality of our system

[Sanjeev Sabhlok <sabhlok@almaak.usc.edu>]

Just thinking.

We need to be very conservative in recommending any intervention by
government, particularly in India.

I thought I'd illustrate with what a senior civil servant told me about
the "appropriate" strategy to be adopted when taking care of the corrupt
people in government. 

According to him, the first step is to frame the charges and to submit the
case to the local district level investigating agencies, such as the
police. Then, within a month, a report should be made to the state level
agency requesting them to take up the case stating that the case is an
important one that cannot be suitably handled at the district level. 
Then, within another month, a case is made out to an even higher level
body to take up the case. 

The idea is not that the case is going to be solved (out of the three
major cases of corruption against officials that I have been involved in
investigation, none could succeed due to various loopholes in the system;
therefore the smarter officers do not use the system in the usual manner
at all).

As a result of the alternative method proposed above, what happens is
(very often) that the corrupt official who was caught, has to pay his way
out of the system at various levels. Generally, all three levels of
monitoring are themselves corrupt and will only use the "case" as fodder
for themselves. This imposes a quick "punishment" on the corrupt official!

Note that this alterative system is actually, quite counterproductive,
since this person who finally escapes from the clutches of the system by
paying his way out, will actually "recover" all his costs again, from the
public resources. 

But note that the key lesson here is not this. It is that expanding a
bureaucracy (appointing Z to check on Y, Y to check on X, X to check on C,
who checks on B, and finally B checks on A who actually does the real
work!) is extremely counterproductive and dangerous. Therefore an ideal
polity would have the minumum level of governance.  Government would
interfere only where it was absolutly essential for it to be involved.

Did you know - nobody in the government, or in the judiciary, knows all
the laws that we have promulgated? And yet we are all of us supposed to
have read and to follow these laws? Our legislatures have turned into a
law generating machine. Our Constitution is the longest in the world.
Perhaps we are the most litigant people in the world, too.

One of the major steps therefore would be to make a list of laws which
need to be scrapped and a list of tasks (and government agencies) which
need to be scrapped and handed back to the private sector to do.

Just a thought.

Sanjeev