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The Pioneer > Online Edition : >> Lazy babus hold up India’s march
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- The Hong Kong-based Political & Economic Risk Consultancy
- has ranked India’s “suffocating bureaucracy”, as the least-efficient. The survey says that working with Indian civil servants is a “slow and painful” process and that these bureaucrats are a power centre in their own right, both at the national and the State levels, and extremely resistant to reforms that affect them or the way they go about their duties.
- sample survey conducted in Karnataka found that in 65 per cent of the civil cases, the Government was a litigant, sometimes on both sides, and so Government litigation “crowds out the private citizen from the court system”.
- The Prime Minister, on the same occasion, also confirmed that the Karnataka survey found much of the Government litigation to be in the form of appeals, and that 95 per cent of such appeals fail. He observed, “In a way, they are appeals that shouldn’t have been made in the first place.”
- many instances where the judges found that citizens were compelled to litigate because of the “utter indifference” of the Government, where the latter pursued litigation on “frivolous” grounds as a “matter of prestige” with an attitude of “vengeance” or “callousness bordering on vendetta”, displaying “arrogance and a superiority complex”.
- the colonial mindset that set the bureaucracy apart from, and above, ordinary citizens, still survives.
- The problem is that our laws are so over-protective of the accused that we seem to have reached a dead end.
- There is also the strange practice of the Government using inefficient and dull bureaucrats as its advisers after their retirement. Actually there are far too many people in Government with practically no work to do.
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