In this season of political mal-content, what gets in adequate at-tention is the fact that there are huge gaps in the power structure of the Government at the moment. The almost continual outpouring of bad news on to the Government has pretty much frozen even bureaucratic decision making for some time now. Most experts believe that the impact of this will show up only in eight to eighteen months when decisions that ought to have been take nnow should have been really actioned. The wait has grown longer for key legislations related to food security, the microfinance sector, be-sides, of course, the Lokpal, amongst others. But the mounting anxiety is at witnessing a cornered government that seems to be lurching from one crisis to another – with the over-whelming impulse for fire-fighting and political survival submerging the pressing needs of policy direction – be it foreign or domestic policy,or just plain simple governance. The other big anxiety is that it’s not just decisions that are pending.Very significantly, very senior positions in the upper reaches of the administration are lying unfilled for longish and intolerable periods of time. Even as the Prime Minister winged his way to the United Nations, the consternation in New Delhi was high on account of the fact that apparently all newly appointed secretaries awaited his return tolearn of their new assignments.
Meanwhile, even the plethora of regulatory bodies which sprung upduring the UPA’s first term, and peopled mostly by the “heaven-born”are, in some cases, victims of this strange apathy or aversion to decision making. The Competition Commission of India (CCI), the anti-trust regulator, has been without a chairman now for close to three months.The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) similarly has beenawaiting a new chief for almost a year while the Government makesup its mind.
The story spins out similarly for several other prominent positions and cadres in the Government. Political masters too lament today vast number of vacancies in the elite IAS and IPS services which don’t ever seem to get filled. At last count, there were 1,447 vacancies in the IPS and 1,155 in the IAS. There is even talk of allowing Army officers to join the police to fast-track the recruitment process. Smells of desperation! And of an in effective UPSC and other such bodies which seem simply unable to cope.
These, of course, are among the more glaring symptoms of the present malaise. With the much-trumpeted administrative reforms seemingly on the backburner, the bureaucracy today is in a bind. Once poised to be released from its template of inertia and dysfunction, itseems to be running to stay in the same place, because the Government has the more pressing issue of its political survival to worry about! As babu watchers and experts on government will say, this is an untenable situation. Nobody’s sure what exactly will happen. Will there be a change in the nature of leadership or will there be a change in the nature of government itself? These are the big questions which hover over New Delhi at the moment. But like withmost anything else these days in the Government, no one really knows.
