Another Independence Day is round the corner. What should we hope for from our government? I once attended a talk by Harvard University’s Lant Pritchett, author of the thesis that India is a “flailing state”. Pritchett means that the head (central government and its policy apparatus) is improperly connected to its limbs (execution on the ground), and so instead of coordinated motion, India flails about.
We could get a most convincing view of how things are progressing well in India, if we got a briefing from the Union government and its senior bureaucracy. An inspection on the ground would reveal a reality that was otherwise. Conceiving and legislating fine policies didn’t mean that these things actually got done.
To illustrate his thesis, Pritchett used material from some academics, among them Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, authors of the book Poor Economics. There were three stories Pritchett recounted. First, that in a test group it was learnt that unless you paid a tout, you would likely fail your driver’s test in Delhi. If you paid, you didn’t have to take the test at all. Meaning that if you chose to follow the law, you would be penalised, and you would be free to drive even if you couldn’t, if you bribed.
So organised was this bribery that none of the Road Transport Office staff were paid directly. So efficient was it, that almost without exception potential drivers were compelled to submit.
The second example was a test where Duflo and Banerjee sent actors to government doctors with classic symptoms of five major diseases. The doctors did not diagnose the patients correctly an astonishing 97% of the time because they weren’t bothered. They did not spend more than 60 seconds with patients on average. If you are going to be diagnosed by your doctor correctly only three per cent of the time, Pritchett said quite rightly, you may as well just stay home.
His third example was about research that found Rajasthan’s nurses don’t turn up for work. Half of them collected salaries for staying at home or doing something else. A well meaning non-profit tried to change this through a system of attendance monitoring. It failed. Nurses continued to stay away from their work, but this time they were equipped, each time they were checked, with an official excuse for their absence.
None of this surprises those who are familiar with things in India. The state has collapsed. Certainly it is dysfunctional. The most charitable view we can take is that it is flailing about.
Little seems to work properly in India. Government is ineffectual and even parliament is effete. I don’t disagree and government in India has never been good. But is that the root of our problem?
Less than three per cent of this nation pays any income tax. We could blame the government for its inability to enforce collections, but what if we look inwards instead?
Pritchett presented a theoretical framework locating the level of dysfunction in each instance. He thought the failings in all the examples could be corrected by the state through working with and reforming the institutions involved: the RTO and the health services and the rest. If I understood him correctly, what is needed is for the government to build a sense of ownership and pride in its institutions. This would help it claw back from the brink by building its capacity.
I asked him if the problem was actually in civil society, not the government. When doctors could not be bothered to even observe patients properly, if nurses took money for staying at home, was that not indicative of a problem that was deeper than just a lack of motivation and supervision?
Pritchett disagreed, saying that culture was not to blame, and he may be right.
The rise of an angry and vocal middle class certainly suggests that a large number of Indians and perhaps the majority agree with the idea that the government is bringing down India and it must improve. The demonstrations led by Anna Hazare and against the Delhi rape took the same view.
But when Indian teachers cannot be bothered to show up to teach or to even properly wash the utensils used to cook food for schoolchildren in. When their response to the deaths of these kids is to refuse supervising meals because it isn’t their job, government is only partly to blame.
We cannot behave in traffic in any city or state of India. I’m not exaggerating and you know what I mean. Here again, it is possible to say, like Arvind Kejriwal does: police Indians firmly. Watch over them and penalize them and they will behave, as they do abroad or on the Delhi Metro. Are other nations functional only because their populations fear punishment? This is not the conclusion one would draw when observing the West.
Only fifty million Indians out of 1.2 billion have passports, which means 95% of Indians have no experience of the world outside India. But as more people travel and notice how developed nations function they are troubled by the state of their home.
One explanation for the sudden and dramatic rise in the popularity across India of Gujarat’s Narendra Modi is that he promises to transform the state. Whether or not he can or will be able to, this promise of his absolves the citizen. It reassures him that what is wrong in India has nothing to do with him. It is government and its functionaries who must improve themselves if India is to be different.
To me this is the minor aspect of change. The major one must come from within. India will change only when we change. Each of us must contribute to this, by being conscientious in our work and, though this is an old-fashioned word, moral with one another, even when we are inconvenienced. For that to happen, no politician is needed. No new government can or will bring it about. Indeed, tinkering with the externals will only take us away from the real problem.
(Aakar Patel is a writer and columnist)
