Bureaucracy perceived to be ‘unresponsive,insensitive,corrupt’
Bureaucracy in India is generally perceived to be “unresponsive, insensitive and corrupt” and a common complaint against it pertains to excessive red-tapism, the Second Administrative Reforms Commission has said.
In its 12th report, the Commission said that during its visits to the states, it interacted with a large number of people and most of them complained of the poor quality of services provided by the government, the indifferent attitude of government servants, corruption and abuse of authority and lack of accountability.
“The reasons for governments not being citizen centric can be attributed to the attitude and work of some government servants, the deficiencies in existing institutional structures and also to some citizens,” the Commission, headed by M Veerappa Moily, said.
While the laws made by the Legislature may be sound and relevant, very often they are not properly implemented by government functionaries, it said.
The institutional structure provided at times may be also weak and ill conceived and thus has neither the capacity nor the resources to implement the laws in letter and spirit, the report said.
“The system often suffers from problems of excessive centralisation and policies and action plans are far removed from the needs of the citizens. This results in a mismatch between what is required and what is being provided,” it said.
The Commission observed that there was a growing concern that the civil services and administration in general had become “wooden, inflexible, self perpetuating and inward looking”.
“Consequently their attitude is one of indifference and insensitivity to the needs of citizens. This, coupled with the enormous asymmetry in the wielding of power at all levels, has further aggravated the situation.
The end result is that officers perceive themselves as dispensing favours to citizens rather than serving them and given the abject poverty, illiteracy, a culture of exaggerated deference to authority has become the norm,” it said.
A common reason usually cited for inefficiency in governance is the inability within the system to hold the civil services accountable for their actions. Seldom are disciplinary proceedings initiated against delinquent government servants and imposition of penalties is even more rare, it said.
“This is primarily because at most levels authority is divorced from accountability leading to a system of realistic and plausible alibis,” the Commission said.
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