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Redressing Grievances: Why India’s New Administrative Reform Legislation May Not Work

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In this article, the author analyses the structural problems of India’s administration which are likely to hamper the functioning of the Citizens’ Right to Grievance Redressal Bill, 2011.

By Siddharth Singh, 16 Dec, 2011

The Citizens’ Right to Grievance Redressal Bill is set to be tabled in the Indian Parliament in the current parliamentary session, after a delay of several years. In the recent months, the Jan Lokpal (Citizens’ Ombudsperson) agitation led by Anna Hazare, which brought to light the people’s frustration with the corruption and inefficiency of the administration, has brought a sense of haste to Dr. Manmohan Singh’s government in the passing of this legislation.

The draft of the bill was posted on a Government website a few months ago (infuriatingly, in the Comic Sans font). This bill is not significantly different in its key tenets from the already-enacted state-level service delivery acts and the other drafts that have been put out by civil society groups such as Anna Hazare’s team.

The bill makes it mandatory for government departments to lay out ‘Citizens’ Charters’, which is a document which specifies the obligations and duties of the department and the administrators, along with the time frame of the delivery of the services. In other words, this bill legislates the right to time bound delivery of services by the government. The bill proposes that violations of service delivery are identified and the erring administrators punished.

This legislation is hence purported go a long way in improving service delivery and even fighting corruption. However, there are structural issues with the administrative setup in India which may render the bill ineffective.

Who defines the services?

The foremost problem with the bill is the lack of the definition of “public service”. The draft of the bill does not have an appropriate definition of what constitutes a service. Even if it did, it would be difficult to implement it across the board. For instance, the passport department is obligated to provide passports after appropriate verification. It would be easy to time-bound the delivery of passports, and to punish those administrators who violate the deadline for reasons they could control.

However, the issue is significantly different in the case of the roads and highways departments in the country. The construction of roads is contingent on budgetary allocations, the status of tenders and contracts with private contractors, technical feasibility and other issues. In case there was a substantial demand for the construction of roads where there are none, the responsible administrator would be swamped with work he or she may not be able to complete within the specified time frame.

The government, possibly for this reason, has left the creation of the Citizens’ Charter in the hands of the heads of the respective departments. This too can be problematic. If the head of the passport department refuses to add the time bound delivery of verified passports, then there is nothing a citizen can do about it. On the other hand, in case the citizens themselves or public representatives were made to create the citizens’ charter, then they would add provisions that would be administratively infeasible and unreasonable to meet. Appointing representative committees to address this issue would also be difficult given the multiplicity of departments.

Who is responsible?

The other issue is that of responsibility. This issue is twofold. Firstly, the draft bill and the existing state-level acts legislate that in case the administrator fails to meet the deadline of service provision, the matter would go straight to the head of the department. The administrators involved in service provision are often at the lowest rungs of the bureaucracy. This has serious implications on the work of the department since the heads are put in place manage and plan at organisational levels. In case they are swamped with such complains, they will not be able to concentrate on their core duties of, inter alia, planning and modernisation.

Secondly, service provision is like often like a relay-race. The service is often linked to to a chain of decision making and operational processes which lead all the way to the top of the administration, and even beyond. In order to win the relay-race, all the runners will have to do their share of running. If any of them fails to do so, the team loses. However, the Grievance Redressal bill purports to only punish the final runner.

To take a more relevant example, in the past few years, the state of Rajasthan has seen protests in villages because the schools in that region have an inadequate number of teachers. In some cases, there are schools with no teachers at all! In order to address this issue, the administrators responsible for ensuring the postings of teachers have done what they could do – they transferred teachers from different villages to the ones where the protests were on. This pacified the protesting villages, but didn’t really address the problem at all, since other schools were made to face the shortage.

In such cases, the administrators often had no choice: there is a shortage of teachers because bureaucrats at the top have not recruited in adequate numbers. They, in turn, have not been able to do so because the ministers of their department have not sanctioned enough posts. (This, in turn, may be because the state doesn’t have the finances for the extra jobs.) However, the Grievance Redressal bill does not account for such structural issues. The only entities responsible are the service-providing administrators at the bottom.

A cylindrical administration

When India got its independence in 1947, the literacy rate was less than 20% and the average life expectancy at birth was in the early 30s. Over the years, with rising standards of living, increasing prosperity and growing state expenditure and finances, the awareness of people has also increased. Naturally, the demand for public services has increased by magnitudes, but the government hasn’t been able to keep pace.

The administration has not grown in size proportionally, which has led to woeful staff shortages. The primary reason for this is financial. Increases in public finances since Independence have led to increases in spending in social schemes and subsidies. Curtailing hiring has been an easy way to save money to divert towards other vote-winning initiatives. On the other hand, given the work load (and political considerations), high ranking bureaucrats have been retained in the administration without concern for administrative structure.

The result of this is that the department structures now are cylindrical rather than pyramidal. Often, the reason for delay in service provision is a result of this, as departments get burdened with more work than they can handle. Many departments are said to run with 40-50% capacity. The police to population ratio, for example, is 145 per 100,000 population, far short of the UN stated minimum of 222 (most advanced nations far exceed this number). That makes it a shortage of over 80,000 police personnel in the country! Of course, administrative sloth, corruption and incompetence are major reasons for delays in work too. While the Grievance Redress bill can take care of the latter, it will end up delivering perverse outcomes as it attempts to deal with the former.

If genuine cases of delays due to overwork are penalised, it will lead to the able administrators leaving for greener pastures. This problem is compounded because the bill (and the draft presented by Anna Hazare’s team) state that any act of repeated delay in service provision will be deemed as an act of “corruption.” This issue is hence very grave and is also the reason why heads of departments in states where such acts are already in place are not adding core functions to the Citizens’ Charter.

Making the bill work

In order to make this bill work, it is imperative that the governments at the centre and in the states work towards filling up the vacancies. Reforms to reshape administrative structures are important. Additionally, it must be ensured that “services” are properly defined and only those services are included in the Citizens’ Charters that are not directly dependent on budgetary allocations. Without these, the Citizens’ Charters will likely look empty or full of non-critical services, hence rendering the bill ineffective.

Postscript: In an interesting anecdote, a senior bureaucrat was once imprisoned in the state of Andhra Pradesh for not following a District Court’s directive. The court had directed him to appoint a junior level administrator to a certain post within a given time frame. In fact, the bureaucrat was helpless as the orders for recruitment had not been passed by the minister-in-charge. Given there was no one to appoint, he couldn’t possibly fill up the vacancy. However, the judge wouldn’t hear any of it. The bureaucrat ended up in jail for no real fault of his, and the case moved up to a higher court for appeal.

Understanding the Anna Hazare Movement through Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Theory

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In this article, the author observes Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption agitation through the lens of Kingdon’s ‘Multiple Streams’ hypothesis. 

By Siddharth Singh, 4 Oct, 2011

It can be argued that India faces graver concerns that need far more attention than the issue of graft and corruption in the administration: issues such as farmer suicides, chronic malnutrition, religion-based violence, human rights violations, female foeticide, police excesses especially in rural India and the lack of justice in the Bhopal gas tragedy case. While activists like Irom Sharmila have been protesting against government apathy and excess for decades, it took a then-unknown Anna Hazare to upheave the political landscape of New Delhi in a matter of months. His agitation – incorrectly dubbed as India’s version of the ‘Arab Spring’ by a few international journalists – gave a semblance of the fast-tracking of an anti-corruption legislation which was in limbo for decades. Why did Anna succeed where others did not?

In order to explain why certain policy proposals emerge rather than others, political scientist John Kingdon has stated that three streams of actions need to converge: the problem stream (the problem must be clearly defined), the solution stream (feasible solutions need to be offered), and the political stream (where political consensus must be obtained). He added that chance plays a big role in the convergence of these streams. This model of Multiple Streams differed from the traditional models which have been described to be ‘linear’. The traditional models focused stepwise on, firstly,  problem identification, secondly, focusing government attention to the problem (known as ‘agenda setting’), thirdly policy proposal development and finally, the adoption of policies.

However, such traditional models inadequately explain the Hazare phenomenon and the relative failure of other activists and agitations in India. Kingdon’s framework is better suited to explain the success of the ‘Gandhian’ Anna Hazare over others. He explains that the convergence of the three ‘streams’ creates a window of opportunity during which policy makers are willing to seriously consider legislation aimed at improving a situation or solving a problem. Anna Hazare’s agitation met this condition while others – such as the Bhopal agitation – have not. In order to understand why, we must first delve further into these three streams and then contextualise it.

The problem stream is related to the recognition of the problem and the conditions that affect their recognition. Scholars have stated that systematic indicators such as dramatic events and crises facilitate public knowledge of the problem.

The solutions or policy stream concerns itself with the strategies that are needed to tackle the identified problem. These strategies and proposals exist as a “soup of ideas” that are generated by a community of researchers, advocates, public officials, and the civil society. These ideas are not static, and continue to mix with other ideas, morph and evolve. The survival of the proposal is determined by their technical feasibility, administrative practicability, compatibility with the dominant values of the society, as well as the national mood and political support.

The political stream is related to the politics that affect the chosen solution. Such politics emanates from electoral compulsions and interest-groups. Proposals that are most likely to rise to the top are the ones that match national mood, are congruent with the government and administration, and also enjoy the support of interest-groups.

The meeting of these three streams results in the formation of policy. It hence becomes clear how Anna Hazare and his team garnered considerable success while – say – Irom Sharmila hasn’t.

The Indian public has been constantly informed of scams after scams at the national and sub-national level over the past few years. The hyperactive media has brought corruption to the forefront while other issues – such as the agrarian crisis and farmer suicides – have not found favour with the media. The oft-spoken of common man in India (at least, in the Indian cities and where there is high penetration of television media), already burdened with corruption in almost all walks of life, saw their frustration with the government and politicians in general peak with the 2G spectrum scam, which implicated ministers at the highest echelons of the administration.

It is here that Anna Hazare and his team was able to garner support with a ‘Gandhian’ hunger strike and a proposal for a Jan Lokpal – Citizen Ombudsman – Bill. This Bill called for a radical overhaul of the anti-corruption machinery in India, even as it concentrated powers into one department which was entrusted to fight corruption. Social media and television media was optimally utilised to sell the idea that this Bill would free India from corruption. His team convinced the people that the Lokpal Bill as framed by the government was spineless and would be ineffective. The ‘silence’ of Prime Minister Dr. Singh and distractive verbal onslaught by Congress Party spokespersons further convinced the people of the same.

The current government had stated that they would introduce the Lokpal Bill this term. However, popular mistrust of the government, parliament and legislatures by the public, coupled with a carefully constructed ‘Gandhian’ image of Anna Hazare (which has been questioned by a few journalists and scholars over his ‘undemocratic’ dictums in his village), led the public to find resonance with the radical Jan Lokpal Bill. Such a feeling was strengthened by  an undemocratic and foolish move by the government to detain Anna Hazare just before his second round of protests, and lodge him in the same prison where the accused of the massive scams had been imprisoned. The symbolism of this move was profound, and the opposition claimed that this brought back memories of the Emergency period, when democracy in India had taken a back-seat under the rule of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

The public was outraged and there was a massive outpouring of support to Anna and an unequivocal condemnation of the government’s move. A chicken run and a strategic shift within the government ensued. The government began working towards amending their version of the Bill ‘to give it more teeth’. On the other hand, scholarly discourse was largely critical of Team Anna’s Bill because of the behemothic size and lack of effective accountability of the proposed Lokpal. Unknown to the public was the fact that Team Anna revised their bill several times (more than 150 times, according to an Anna team member) to ‘mellow’ it down and make it more feasible due to the pressure of the academia as well as certain sections of the media. The government, on the other hand, proposed that their Bill would be reviewed by the Parliamentary Standing Committee, which had in the past amended a ‘weak’ Right to Information Bill draft and made it one of the most effective legislation to fight corruption and graft that India has seen. This Bill was passed by the parliament under the very same government in its previous term. However, public support (at least in the cities and small towns as reported by the media) of the parliament and politicians had hit rock-bottom. Anna Hazare and his team used this mistrust of the government to successfully get the parliament to accept a few terms and conditions, as no politician wanted to be seen opposing Anna in any manner.

While both the government and Team Anna changed their positions to reach their respective half-ways, the protest was perceived by the public as  a success of Team Anna and a censure of the politicians. The coming to light of the scams in a big way and the political churning that ensued fit neatly into the problem and solution streams of Kingdon’s framework respectively. In order for the Lokpal to see the light of the day, the political stream would also have to meet the other two streams in the near future.

Today, there are calls of resistance against the merger of existing anti-corruption agencies with the proposed Lokpal agency. Such resistance comes from the agencies themselves, and these form the interest-groups that Kingdon mentions. Unless the positions of the interest groups don’t align with the political outlook and popular opinion, there will be no easy passage of a Lokpal Bill. It can be reasonably argued that owing to the political and public pressure, this stream will also begin to tend towards the others in the near future.

On the other hand, issues such as farmer suicides, the continuing problems of the Bhopal survivors and the excesses related to the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act – ASFPA – have not found resonance with the public at large. The cause of repealing ASFPA, for example, remains controversial because many claim that it is against the interests of ‘national security’ and because of the untainted image of the Army among the public. In the case of farmer suicides, there is a severe lack of reporting in the national media. Journalists such as P. Sainath have stated that more national journalists cover a single fashion show in Mumbai than the total number who report on the agrarian crisis in India – a sector that impacts upwards of 60% of India’s population.

The three streams as laid by Kingdon’s framework hence seem to be bending towards each other fairly well in the case of the Jan Lokpal Bill, but are distant in other cases. It may become imperative for the leaders of other movements to go the extra mile to frame the issues appropriately. However unfortunately, it is chance that will play a major role in determining the success – in the form of implementation of respective policies – of agitations.

The author can be followed on Twitter @siddharth3