The case of the powerful, powerless sarkari officer

Gov shastra

My colleague and I were in a District Education Office in Bihar. It had all the typical trappings of power. The officer we were meeting arrived with a litany of staff carrying his papers (and lunch box). In the short walk to his chamber, he barked orders to his staff, and as he sat on his chair and removed his Ray-Ban glasses, he commanded waiting visitors (mostly local residents and schoolteachers) out of his room while he speaks to the “Delhi madam”.

Yet, through the course of an hour-long conversation, he repeatedly described himself as a powerless, voiceless “post officer”. Government, he said, was all powerful. If Sarkar wants, it can do a lot, he added when we asked about improving education in the district. But he had no role and no power. All he could do is implement orders. This officer is not alone. Over nearly a decade, I have had interactions with bureaucrats at the frontline – village, block, district level – across states, and this story is repeated. We are powerless cogs, moving paper and responding to orders from the administrative hierarchy. We have no voice.

At first, I dismissed these claims as no more than an illustration of an apathetic, corrupt bureaucracy looking to shirk responsibility. After all, data shows that frontline bureaucrats are routinely absent, often corrupt, and deeply inefficient. But the regularity with which these claims were made forced me to reconsider. As I began to engage with these narratives seriously, I learnt a lot more about the lived realities of administration at the grassroots and why our debates and policy action on administrative reforms are designed to fail.

Global scholarship on public administration and governance has long pointed to worker discretion and autonomy glued together by a strong sense of mission and purpose as the key ingredient of high-performing public sector organisations. This is common sense, you could argue, but as the guru of American public administration Herbert Kauffman’s classic study on the US governments’ forest rangers shows, achieving this goal requires careful alignment between management practice, hierarchy, rules and procedures with the organisation’s purpose. The US forest service achieved high levels of performance despite the fact that rangers were spread often in remote areas because it deployed hierarchy to appeal to the rangers’ professional identity as foresters and cultivate an allegiance to the mission of forest protection (through processes determined by the leadership) while leaving enough discretion that rangers, in stark contrast to our “powerless” bureaucrats, described themselves as free agents, “kings in their own domains”. Scholars such as Judith Tendler and Merlie Grindle, who’ve studied bureaucracy in developing countries such as Brazil, Tanzania, Bolivia arrived at similar conclusions -- discretion, autonomy, and a culture of accountability steeped in a shared mission, or what Grindle calls “mission mystique”, are the key ingredients of higher-performing bureaucracies.

Contrast this with the narratives of bureaucrats I hear across India. Powerlessness and lack of autonomy are repeated themes. My research suggests that this is not an outcome of the apathetic bureaucrat alone. Rather, it is a logical consequence of a centralised administrative culture that has canonised hierarchy to a point where responding to hierarchy through the tools of bureaucracy – rules, circulars, orders -- are the guiding purpose of bureaucracy at the frontlines.

Let me explain. In 2012, my colleagues and I followed the daily activities of block level education bureaucrats in four states. They spent most of their day executing tasks ordered by their bosses, mostly gathering data, actively ignoring schools and parents whom they met routinely during the day -- reinforcing to block officers that their primary purpose was to respond to the demands of the hierarchy rather than school needs. In other words, they were post officers.

In another instance, between 2016 and 2019, my research team built a database of “circulars/orders” issued by the Education department to government schools in Delhi. The circular shaped the everyday life of the school. It commanded teachers and bureaucrats to perform tasks using words like “mandatory”, “must do”, and threatened them with “sanctions”, “penalties” and “strict action”. The message was clear: the classroom was not the purpose of their job, the orders were. “We are clerks”, many said, “responding to orders”.

When a bureaucrat’s self-image is dominated by the “post officer”, they cast themselves as passive agents of a hierarchical system, doing what is “ordered” of them. It is the fulfilment of orders the defines “performance” within the system. As one bureaucrat put it, “As long as we follow orders and respond to requests, we are doing our job.” For the rest, it is, in the words of an education administrator, “complete rest in comfortable conditions”. Inaction and inefficiency are thus legitimised, allowing power-drunk district officers, like the man I began this article with, to claim powerlessness, without batting an eyelid!

The reason these narratives of bureaucrats are worth engaging with is not to cast a sympathetic eye on a system that routinely fails, but as a provocation to ask whether we have understood the problem correctly. Rather than ask what it will take to improve morale, empower officers and build a “mission mystique”, the current menu of reforms are about reinforcing hierarchy. We have introduced biometric attendance, brought in GPS technology, set up command and control centres (they are really called that!) at state headquarters to tighten monitoring and elicit accountability through hierarchy. But can reinforcing hierarchy alone resolve a problem that is of its own creation? We need new debates, new ideas and new perspectives to reform governance in India. To wit, the man in the Maybach glasses must empower the man in the Ray-Bans, not belittle him.