Who is responsible when governments falter?

Governance in India will improve only when we start holding officials accountable for both minor and major lapses

The death of 14 people at a government function in Maharashtra led to a political firestorm. In response, the state government announced a compensation of Rs 500,000 to each victim’s family.

Unfortunately, we Indians have seen this script play out many times. First, we experience bureaucratic apathy, ranging from the minor inconveniences of paperwork to major invasion of our rights. Then we sometimes have ad-hoc and unscientific monetary compensation funded from taxpayer money. Finally, the tragedy fades away from the media limelight a few weeks later.

In the process, government officials do not face sufficient pressure to do their jobs well. Instead, citizens develop a thick skin, either because we see these as inevitable inconveniences of a creaking bureaucracy, or because they happen to a stranger in a distant land. Demanding better from governments, however, is not just our right as citizens, but our contribution to nation-building.

Two political scientists who studied government accountability and performance in over 100 countries, for example, compare governments to waiters in a noisy restaurant. The waiters may not like clamouring clients, like politicians do not like clamouring citizens, but the noise is necessary to get their service.

Nowhere is this callous lack of accountability more evident than in our criminal justice system. Nearly 70 percent of those in Indian prisons have not been convicted of a crime, but are instead awaiting judgement. These are not temporary visitors — over a quarter of them have been behind bars for over a year. Nearly 1.6 percent — or about 5,000 undertrials — have spent over five years awaiting trial. Such delays often have easily avoidable reasons, such as the unavailability of vehicles or personnel to take undertrials to court. However, government systems lack sufficient motivation to fix these gaps.

Even schemes that explicitly provide for citizen compensation have failed to live up to their promise. For example, our rural employment guarantee scheme states that eligible citizens who have applied for work but have not received it will be provided monetary compensation. However, aggrieved citizens often do not see it in their bank accounts. For example, Punjab has not made a single unemployment allowance payment since the scheme began in 2006. When governments do not hold themselves accountable for the promises they make to citizens through the law, it leads to erosion of trust that has much larger economic and social repercussions.

The underlying causes of this pervasive indifference are structural and require a deeper intervention. A government edifice whose foundations are borrowed from colonial times is ill-equipped to meet the aspirations and accountability that today’s Indians expect. This is particularly true for issues related to law and order, where the 1861 law that has inspired almost all our police laws does not even pay lip service to citizen participation or accountability. While we have robust accountability through elections every five years, we need to go much further to foster a culture of everyday accountability.

To be fair, the governments have attempted to do so. The Right to Information Act, for example, provides for a financial penalty of Rs 250 per day on officials for failure to provide information to citizens within set timelines. Yet, the system is struggling to perform under the weight of queries. By June, over 314,000 appeals are pending under the RTI across India. Therefore, we need to do more to make governments accountable for their lapses and reimagine the citizen-State relationship in all aspects of our life.

One way to do so is by creating independent oversight over the government’s various functions. New York, for example, has set up a Civilian Complaint Review Board that investigates citizens’ complaints about police misbehaviour or high-handedness. The board has more than 100 investigators who are not drawn from the police and, therefore. likely to be less biased. Between 2001 and 2020, the body recommended disciplinary action against 3,188 police officers, including termination for seven of them.

Another lever to enhance accountability is to create transparency that, in turn, feeds into performance evaluation. Private companies often use metrics such as net promoter scores to gauge customer happiness. It is time for India to collect such data to evaluate the performance of government departments. The data can be used to reward bureaucrats who run their mandates efficiently — for example, through faster promotions to more prominent departments.

Ultimately, government accountability is a complex issue that is influenced by laws, attitudes, and incentives. As the RTI and lokpal movements have shown us, change will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. A rigid bureaucracy will be slow and often unwilling to respond to our aspirations. Often, the noisy customers at the restaurant will eventually prevail in the end.

(Subhashish Bhadra is Director, Klub, and author of Caged Tiger: How Too Much Government is Holding Indians Back.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.