Links to articles on Indian Bureaucrats

from The Bayesian Heresy. Some articles by a retired I.A.S. officer B.S. Raghavan from 1998 ,from 2007andand March 18, 2008 which is to be concluded. Excerpts from the last article:
" ...implementation, maintenance and service delivery are at the very heart of India’s efforts to sustain and accelerate the pace of growth. And yet, these three precisely are its blind spots, acting as a drag on the economy.
...
Few public functionaries — whether in government, public sector, or local bodies — paid out of taxpayers’ money feel answerable to anyone, least of all to the public, for timely completion of tasks entrusted to them or for performing the services expected of them in a spirit of dedication and with a sense of urgency.

No wonder, the World Bank was forced to use strong language by describing the quality of governance in many Indian states as “appalling”.

This, despite public officials being very generously treated compensation-wise. Mark these words culled from past World Bank reports:

“…even among equivalent jobs the public sector exceeds the private: A factory worker in a wholly central government-owned establishment makes 2.5 times more than in a wholly private establishment, regular public sector teachers earn several times more than the average among private teachers (or than teachers hired directly by communities). In fact, one of the drivers of higher wage inequality in the “liberalising” 1990s was that public sector wages grew much faster than private sector regular job wages or informal casual work. Real wages in the public sector increased by 44 per cent over this period — increasing the public sector premium for (observationally) equivalent workers from 48 to 68 per cent.

Overstaffing


“High wages with little accountability for actual service delivery make public sector agencies an obvious target for patronage hiring, which results at times in massive overstaffing. The Mumbai Municipal Water Corporation has 35 workers per thousand connections, whereas well-functioning utilities have about 3 per thousand. The UP Irrigation Department employs an astonishing 110,000 people…The overstaffing often comes at very low levels of the organisation… about 70 per cent of all government employees are support staff unrelated to public services — drivers, peons, clerks.

“While there are millions of dedicated civil servants — teachers, health workers, policemen, engineers, registration officials —attempting to do their jobs well in spite of the systems that work against this, it also cannot be denied that all too often attempts to seek services from the public sector encounter workers who are absent, incompetent, indifferent, and outright corrupt.”

These reports are a few years old. What with the bounties generously handed by the Central Fifth Pay Commission, and adopted in their entirety by the States for their employees whose duties and responsibilities can by no stretch of imagination be deemed to be on a par with those of the Central Government, the differentials between the public and private sectors would only have further widened in favour of public sector functionaries."