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During some of its training programmes, the Accountability Initiative team begins classes by explaining the structure of India’s governments – the executive facet of it – as distinguished from the legislature and the judiciary, with a table and appropriate visuals.

The Executive, we say, comprises the political executive (such as the Cabinet, the Prime Minister, chief ministers and other ministers) and the ‘permanent’ executive or the bureaucracy. We then deconstruct the bureaucracy into various sections, such as the secretariats, the field offices, parastatals, PSUs, think tanks, regulators, quasi-judicial bodies.

Within each category we further sub-divide them into groups. For instance, parastatals in India can be statutory corporations, companies registered under the Companies Act or registered societies. Regulatory bodies can be temporary or permanent, or statutory (like the Electricity Regulatory Authorities) or Constitutional (such as the Election Commission).

However, even as we explain our visuals, one can sense that our students struggle with understanding how the government executive is structured and run. We can give all the examples possible during a two-hour lecture session, but doubts remain. Sometimes, the question asked by our students stump us too. What is the RBI, they ask. Is it a statutory regulator, or a parastatal? We falter in our answers.

Government is complex.

The government is perfectly comfortable with its complexity. They do not feel duty-bound to explain to anybody how they run their systems. Indeed, they like and revel in their complexity. It protects them from being overwhelmed by demands for accountability. The more complex the government structure, the easier it is to blame someone else for what goes wrong. When a city corporation officer says that he cannot do anything about potholed roads because road repairs are being done by the Smart City Private Limited – a Johnny Come Lately in the urban governance space – it is not a lament, it is an exultation. ‘You cannot hold me responsible, so there,’ that is what the officer is saying to you!

Yet, this fuzzy structure, where a number of differently configured bodies straddle varied responsibilities and elbow and jostle for space, can be counterproductive to the government itself. Government officers will never admit it, but they too have a hard time making out who is answerable to whom. The complexity is so chronic, that even the progenitors of the system cannot understand it.

How government complexity comes back to bite those who defend it, happens, sadly, after retirement. Many officers have served in several departments and parastatals. Their life’s journey is captured in a ‘Service Register’, which records vital details such as period of service, salary structure. If this Service Register is lost, which is not an uncommon event, then one’s pension cannot be settled. Thus, the foundation is laid for one’s post-retirement entertainment, which is to ensure that one gets the pension to which one is justified.

However, these stories mean nothing to a classroom full of young ladies and gentlemen who wish to know how the government functions. So we resort to examples, and resign ourselves to answering tricky questions asked of us.

While one may overcome the inconveniences of teaching a drab description of how the government executive is structured, the question that remains unasked is whether the executive needs to have so many layers and structures? While the difference between a policy-determining secretariat and a policy-executing field department is easily understood, it is more difficult to understand the need for so many boards, corporations and authorities to run the executive. It is here that one needs to constantly review the need for such bodies, as governance priorities change.

 

Government officers will never admit it, but they too have a hard time making out who is answerable to whom.

 

Yet, it is easier said than done to shut down government parastatals when they have outlived their agenda. Many parastatals recruit staff for a full 30+ year span, even though they may only have a time frame of a decade or more to fulfil their agenda. To some extent, new age parastatals are peopled by consultants who could be discharged from service, if the parastatal closes down. However, many staff perceive their appointment to be permanent, and they bring pressure to be absorbed and accommodated elsewhere in the government.

Parastatals are thus often continued beyond their useful life.

Those who get absorbed heave a sigh of relief, only to waken up at retirement to realise that their service books are lost and, therefore, their pensions cannot be settled fully, taking into account their entire service in the government.

We cannot teach all that in a classroom. Considering we too barely understand what’s going on.

T.R. Raghunandan is an Advisor at Accountability Initiative.

Also Read More About: The Understanding State Capabilities learning programme

I like teaching, though I am not trained for it.

Over the years, I’ve enjoyed teaching in diverse classrooms, ranging from bureaucrats, to interns working in the government, and even other teachers.

Through these years, teaching has transformed me. I used to be opinionated and inflexible about what I would teach and how I would teach it. This came from earlier experience in lecturing to bureaucrats in training institutions, where, mostly because of one’s seniority or the fact that the bureaucrats who run theses training institutions are themselves not trained teachers, one was given a free hand. I was used to not being questioned about my methods.

However, since then I’ve worked more with pedagogists, who advise me on what I should say, how, and in what sequence. I am putty in their hands — because they know more about comprehension and cognition than I do.

As we emerge from the COVID-19 mayhem, the Accountability Initiative has begun its training season in earnest. Usually beginning from September, we get into our stride. This year has been particularly busy, with three training programmes done and a few more expected before the end of the year.

In our programmes, where I touch upon the basic theories that relate to fiscal federalism, we have sessions devoted to the history of democratic decentralisation in India, followed by sessions on the structure of the government. The last sessions are the ones that I find most difficult to teach. In our sessions on the structure of the government, we speak about the three vertical divisions, namely, the legislature, judiciary and the executive. We also discuss the three horizontal levels, namely, the union, state and local governments.

This can be boring and confusing to the most diligent of students, if these are not supported by adequate visuals or examples. Even so, there are limitations in creating an image of how the government is subdivided. To make our task easier, we conduct these sessions only after we have done involved sessions on decentralisation, and how functions are assigned to different governments in a decentralised governance system.

Last week, Rajika Seth, my colleague who masterminds our training outreach programmes, and I took stock of a recently finished programme. I remarked how the patterns of confusion in the minds of the students were repeating themselves.

Here are some common misperceptions that we see, when we ask students to give examples of various government institutions and positions, and slot them into a grid distinguished by the three vertical divisions of the legislature, judiciary and the executive, and the horizontal levels of the union, state and local governments.

As concerns the legislature, there is universal understanding that it comprises (at the union-level) of the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha; at the state-level of the Vidhana Sabhas and the Vidhana Parishads; and at the local-level of the elected Panchayat and Municipal bodies. Of course, purists might argue that, strictly speaking, the local representatives cannot make law. However, we assert that they can issue byelaws and set the rules. This is, broadly speaking, a performance of legislative function at that level.

Then comes the judiciary, where there is no confusion in the minds of students that it comprises the Supreme Court at the union, and the High Courts at the state-level. They also understand that these two levels are vertically integrated through the process of the selection of judges. However, confusion usually arises when students categorise District and Munsiff courts as part of the local level of government.

This is where we once again emphasise the significance of the process of deconcentration and distinguish it from ‘devolution’. We explain that the District and Munsiff courts are not devolved entities; they have not even the remotest connection with the local district and sub-district local governments. Simply because they are located at the district and sub-district levels, they cannot be classified as local institutions; they are more in the nature of deconcentrated local extensions of the state-level judiciary, entirely controlled by the latter.

I often wonder if students get that difference.

In order to emphasise the distinction, I speak of the idea of the Nyaya Panchayats, provisions for which have been enacted in seven states, even though they are operational only in two. I draw attention to the fact that Nyaya Panchayats are not selected by the higher judiciary, but through a statutory election process and that their adjudication is more in the nature of dispute resolutions without the trappings of a court. That could arguably be a local judicial institution, I assert.

‘What about Grama Nyayalayas?,’ some students ask, and I am stumped. For the reason that whilst these are supposed to be located at sub-Taluk levels, they are still not local in the sense that they are controlled and superintended by the local governments. They are examples of further deconcentration below the Taluk level, I explain. I am usually met with silence, which I fear is an absence of comprehension.

However, where Rajika and I face the greatest challenge, is to explain the labyrinth that is the structure of the executive. We argue often on how we best explain that. Do we do it through a boring table? (Which is what we do at the moment.) Do we use powerful imagery, of a hydra-headed monster? No, that would be too negative, I think.

More about the mess that is India’s executive, bureaucracy in India in my next blog.

T.R. Raghunandan is an Advisor at Accountability Initiative.

Also Read More About: The Understanding State Capabilities learning programme