ASSESSING GOVERNMENT: PERSONAL NOTES

It has been around five years that I have been working with government, at various levels in our federal system, during which many myths have been exploded and many insights gained. What has emerged is a more informed sense of what is needed to improve public governance. Some take-aways:

There are hundreds of extremely competent, honest people in government, enough to be agents of larger change. Unfortunately, they are not leveraged enough. In government, even if an officer does an outstanding job, she will still get transferred in a few years. In the private sector, this person would get additional responsibilities in the same area, whether it is project management, marketing, manufacturing etc. While there is certainly good argument to develop generalists, this could be for the first phase of any administrator's career; around the midway-mark, they should develop specialisations.
There is no institutional structure that can deliver on scale like the government: there are very few private-sector firms that have the kind of competency that government has in doing this, whether the issue is education, health, basic infrastructure etc.
Unfortunately, what government can do in quantity, it cannot do with significant precision on quality. While there are several reasons for this, the one that strikes me as most significant is that Government has no experience in partnering with other players; if the scale of government delivery can be combined with the finesse of smaller players, the results would be extraordinary. One of these other players is the citizen herself, ironically the central character around whom the whole script has supposedly been penned.
In all my interactions with government, I am surprised to see the absence of the youth. All my experiences in the private sector and in Janaagraha have shown the power of the energy and talent of youth. There are thousands of college students who can be brought in as interns by government, getting exposure to important skills in a variety of fields: communications, technology, engineering, health, education etc. Well-organised internship programmes can be at the heart of a sustainable change in the flow of new ideas coursing through the veins of government.
If we need to move beyond superficial terms like transparency and accountability to actual change in quality-of-life for citizens, I believe it is with participatory processes. This requires formal spaces, not informal consultation sessions.
Today, the average citizen has no “space” or “platform” from which to interact with government. As a result, people feel alienated and disempowered. When there is no space, the energies and frustrations of the people tends to burst out in destructive eruptions that tend to exacerbate “us” and “them” sentiments, and drive citizens and government further apart.
A large portion of government's reluctance to provide formal spaces to citizens is the low level of trust that government has in citizens: both in terms of their willingness to act selflessly, as well as in their skills to bring specific value to any discussion. At a broad general level, government is willing to “listen” to citizens, but not willing to allow citizens to actually make or participate in decisions themselves.
Politicians are actually quite responsive to the needs of the people, if the people are outspoken (I am not talking of corruption – of course, many are corrupt – rather, about the capacity to bring change). Even at the local government level, many of them are intelligent individuals, chipping away to secure benefits for themselves and their constituencies from a system that nobody controls. Unfortunately, there is little political leadership to make the system itself more sensible and structured, so the collective appearance is a bizarre tableau that would be comical if it were not for the tragic human consequences.
Every institutional arrangement has its own particular ethos; government is no exception. The relationship that exists between administration and elected representatives is a complex one: the lakshman rekha is drawn at different points by different actors, depending on their personalities. Sometimes, the level of compromise is greater, sometimes less. Invariably, every officer has a line of control, beyond which compromise is not allowed.
There are hundreds of civil society organisations that have emerged over the past few decades to fill the governance gap. While a few are exemplary organisations, many are flawed in many ways: lack of focus, consistency, delivery and even worse, of integrity. The very “power” that is being challenged among the institutions of government, is often actively being sought and retained. Many are caught in ideological dead-ends, and do not have the intellectual honesty to admit this. My only assessment is that this is also a social “marketplace” at work, that over time, the less robust ones will wither away and die.
There are those who are constantly poking holes in the idea of government. Unfortunately, much of the inflammatory material that I read is incoherent: a broad swathe of criticism leveled at government, multi-national companies, urbanisation, globalisation. While criticism is important, it comes with the obligation to articulate an alternative, one that works in the real world, for the majority of people. Every institutional structure has flaws. And there can be no vision for the future that does not have government as a key player in giving people the freedom to live their lives as they choose. We need to make this complex eco-system work.

As a student of democracy over these past few years, I have encountered piece after piece of evidence to suggest that what is missing is the participation of citizens. Not as CUSTOMERS of the services of the government, but as PARTNERS in the process. Not as someone standing outside the ivory towers where the decisions are made, but as joint decision-makers, sitting at the table. Not as emasculated recipients getting rationed crumbs of tokenism, but in the fullest sense, with the same information that is available to the administrative and political leadership.

Much of this argument is not new: it has been advocated, accepted, legalised (through the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments) and now being actively pursued in rural India . While there are still enormous challenges in implementing the legal provisions, there is a great deal of energy emanating from within many state governments to solidify this process in rural areas. Issues such as untying of funds, streamlining of programmes, capacity building and training of Gram Panchayat members are among the hottest potatoes being tossed around in state legislatures.

However, such leadership is sorely lacking in urban decentralisation. Caught in the penumbra of the spotlight on their rural brethren, the urban dwellers are finding themselves in a governance vacuum. And as the nation urbanises, this vacuum can only grow.

Unless we start building the scaffolding of citizen participation.