India entangled in bureaucracy and corruption
In cricket-loving India, you would think it easy to buy match tickets if the stadium is half empty. Not so.
A colleague and I breezily tried to gain access one morning to Delhi’s Feroz Shah Kotla ground to watch the fourth test between India and South Africa, only to be told no tickets were on sale there despite the vacant seats.
Article Courtesy: Victor Mallet, Financial Times
A policeman directed us to a police station 10 minutes walk away and muttered, in a suspiciously vague manner, that we might find some tickets nearby. At the station, the officers directed us further up the road to a Café Coffee Day, where the barista sent us to a district on the other side of the stadium.
Baffled, we were driven around in an auto — one of Delhi’s ubiquitous three-wheeled taxis — until we chanced upon a crowd of young men shouting. That must be it, we thought. Sure enough, hundreds of tickets were piled on the ground inside a makeshift enclosure by the side of the road and being sold at Rs100 ($1.50) each, while policemen with sticks tried to beat back the queue-jumpers.
Corruption? Incompetence? Bad planning? It was hard to explain this comical scene, although at the match we did end up in a stand with schoolchildren and teachers whose tickets cost them Rs10 each. But it was a reminder that administrators and bureaucrats — ably helped by the justice system and the police — manage to turn even the simplest task into a nightmare for ordinary Indians.
Article Courtesy: Victor Mallet, Financial Times
At the Ministry of Railways the other day, I was told by a young, energetic and exasperated bureaucrat that it had taken one and a half years to reach a decision on whether to provide a cheap mug for the toilet ablutions in second-class sleeper carriages (and whether it needed a chain to stop people stealing it). All this at a time when the ministry wants to spend $137bn in the next five years on upgrading the rail network.
Sir Humphrey of Yes Minister, the British comedy series about politics and the civil service, has nothing on the average India babu bureaucrat. Recently I received an email from the finance ministry entitled: “Chairman, PFRDA calls for increasing the coverage of State Autonomous Bodies (SABs) and to bring the unorganised workers including Anganwadi & Asha workers and SHGs within the ambit of NPS . . .” and that was just the start of the headline.
On my desk is the latest copy of the Indian magazine, Bureaucracy Today (“Fearless journalism, our habit, our history!”). It is not satirical. The cover story examines the merits of the budget-busting 23 per cent pay rise awarded to more than 10m serving and retired civil servants . Anil Kumar Jain’s astrology column in the magazine is notable for the way it recycles phrases through the 12 signs of the zodiac. They include “Planets indicate unbelievable financial gains during this month” and “You may be nominated for a plum post or for a foreign assignment”; or the disconcerting “The unusual behaviour of your spouse may be a cause of concern”.
But there is a serious side to the obstructive power of Indian bureaucrats and the corruption of tax officers, factory inspectors, teachers and the police. They make life difficult not only for individuals and investors but even for the government they are supposed to serve. Narendra Modi, the ambitious prime minister, forced civil servants to show up to work on time, clean their offices and clear the backlog of files on their desks when he took office 18 months ago. Since then, however, ministers have found themselves blocked and outmanoeuvred at every turn by the Sir Humphreys of India and their subordinates.
State governments are at least as dysfunctional as the centre, and Indians have rightly blamed the complacency and corruption of local officials for two environmental disasters in the past month: the lethal floods in Chennai, worsened by corruption in urban planning and the lack of drainage, and the choking air pollution in Delhi and north India.
Tickets for cricket matches seems a small matter by comparison, though I could have foreseen trouble if I had read Mr Jain’s grim predictions for my fellow Taureans in the bureaucracy. He forecast a bad month of “fear psychosis” and a failure to meet targets. “Results,” he said, “will be far from your expectations.”