Correcting distortions in governance

Correcting distortions in governance
The ultimate aim is to ensure that it is the citizens who shall govern and not the administration, with due focus on accountability
by Pramod Kumar
GOVERNANCE : For whom and for what? This question normally gets lost in the processes, procedures and application of technology. To illustrate, the application of unique ID numbers, no doubt, shall provide efficiency, but only to the existing process of undignified and exploitative exchange between the citizens and the government. These rules of exchange in many spheres do not protect the rights and the entitlements of the people on the margins besides treating a fairly large section of the citizenry in an undignified manner.
Rules of governance have become so overtly violative that the system has been rendered non-functional. Earlier, an easy explanation used to be the prevalence of corruption, high transaction costs and lack of transparency. Interestingly, even corruption has ceased to perform one of its foremost functions, i.e. facilitation and efficiency. This has been exemplified in the preparation for the Commonwealth Games, wherein even large-scale corruption could not induce efficiency. A clear message emerges that the system has ceased to be functional. Consequently, the Army was reportedly assigned the task of killing mosquitoes to facilitate a Dengue-free hosting of the Commonwealth Games.
The first initiative is to be taken to restore the identity of the citizens. Even after 63 years of Independence, citizens have to prove their identity. This mistrust has been institutionalised to the extent that even to prove their name, they have to seek affirmation from a gazetted officer of the government. For declarations relating to their profession, income, caste, residence proof, etc., affidavits are to be given on legal papers sworn before a Magistrate or public notary. Even to procure ration cards, electricity, sewerage and water connection, birth and death certificates, applications for admission to the educational institutions, affidavits attested by the gazetted officer or third party or public notary, or Magistrate have to be produced. The govern-mentality continues to treat citizens as colonial subjects. However, most of these affidavits are local inventions and are not required by law.
However, the ‘govern-mentality’ of mistrust has resisted any attempt to repose trust in its own citizens by accepting self-declarations as reliable and authentic. The Punjab Government by its order discontinued the practice of submission of affidavits unless required by law.
Further, the services are rendered to the citizens not as a matter of right but as a dole. To reverse this, a legislation has been proposed by the Governance Commission to make it mandatory for administration to serve the people. The purpose is not merely to provide corruption -free and harassment-free services but to send the signal that it is citizens who shall govern and not the administration. In other words, the main focus is on accountability rather than efficiency.
The government accepted the Commission’s recommendation to legislate an act to ensure delivery of services as a right to the citizen. It includes around 48 services from the Departments of Revenue, Local Self-Government, Electricity, Police, Food and Civil Supplies, Health, Transport, etc. This will transform the terms of interaction between the citizens and the administration.
Further, the administrative division of population on the basis of caste and religion has multiplied social cleavages and led to the denial of full citizenship. The decision to conduct caste-based census is a sign of diversity insensitivity that shall only produce fractured identity as a citizen.
Recently, another initiative to protect the girl child, pregnant women was tracked to prohibit them from seeking sex selection tests to abort a female foetus. As this is violative of the citizen’s privacy, it has the potential to provide license to those who treat women as commodities. The Commission has suggested that the government should enforce law on private and public sector medical practitioners and at the same time attempt to enhance the value of the girl child by ensuring tracking of the girl child through her life cycle from birth to death and interweave incentive-oriented schemes to check both female foeticide and cultural neglect.
The pervasiveness of cultural neglect of the girl child has been proved beyond doubt by the provisional census data 2011. The provisional census data have shown how sex ratio at birth has shown some improvement, but child sex ratio (0-6 years) has shown a major decline.
Along with loss of identity, lack of respect and dignity is reflected in everyday interactions of the people with the government. The spatial disconnect experienced by the citizens in the police stations in particular and the District Collectorates in general, is more pronounced. The visit to these spaces gives a feeling of alien space and a sense of loss of dignity and identity. And, interactions with the police and consequent loss of dignity has been described succinctly in the Fifth Report of the National Police Commission (November 1980). The Commission expressed anguish that the 1902 Fraser Commission’s observation that ‘people’ now may not dread the police, but they certainly dread getting involved with it in any capacity, continues to be valid.
This political interference which has become an accepted part of the political culture (not only in Punjab but in many other states) has produced glaring distortions in the practice of governance leading to dilution of hierarchy, dysfunctional internal accountability mechanisms and patronage-centric governance. To illustrate, the average tenure in 2009 of a Station House Officer is around six months, which was about seven months in 2004. In the case of a Deputy Superintendent of Police, the same is ten months and one year for the District Superintendent of Police.
Therefore, it is suggested that the tenure of the police personnel may be fixed in consonance with the Police Act and a performance audit report may be considered as the basis for transfers and postings. The language of power is different from the language of justice. The institutions of justice delivery understand with clarity the language of power and material rather than listening to the feeble voices of the dispossessed.
A third set of prerequisites relates to productivity, i.e. to engage people with the system in a productive manner and provide conducive conditions to nurture people’s capacity to be productive and their ability to exercise some degree of control over their lives.
To illustrate, in the section on Social Security and Welfare Programmes, it has been brought out how the social security programmes like Pensions and Shagun are given as doles to a large section of the ineligible population. This has become a practice with successive governments. Consequently, it leads to wastage to the tune of about Rs 220 crore and Rs 40 crore in the case of old-age pension and Shagun schemes respectively. The need is to identify the deserving beneficiaries as also to ensure that its reach is periodically evaluated.
Instead of productive engagement of the citizen, a culture of sharing of the spoils is reinforced. Subsidies directed at the poor are given as doles and subsidies directed to protect the profits are described as ‘rescue’ packages.
A fourth set of prerequisites relates to the allocation of roles to various institutions. Since administration is compartmentalised in the departments and each department has its own priorities, if a particular department’s priorities take precedence over the other, that is likely to lead to dissonance within the system. There is no dearth of examples to demonstrate this point.
In 2004-05, the Department of Finance of Punjab, in its overactive commitment to impose fiscal management, came out with a scheme to contract untrained ‘teachers’ from the same village to cut government expenditure. As a result, the quality of teaching further deteriorated and, later, all the contractual ‘teachers’ launched protest and demanded that they should be trained as teachers and that their services be regularised. This scheme was spearheaded by fiscal management framework rather than access to equity concern in quality education.
As a result, the inability to maintain delicate functional balance between the institutions produced a major crisis in governance. The tendency to empower institutions with ad hoc license has a clear message, i.e. to kill poison with poison and letting the patient die. This has made governance less a matter of politics, more of an administrative policy and the discretionary political interference.

The writer is Chairperson, Punjab Governance Reforms Commission and Director, Institute for Development and Communication, Chandigarh