Nearly three decades ago, officials and employees of the Tea Board of India, in Calcutta, were dumbfounded as their chairman angrily rushed down from his office on the eighth floor and suddenly locked up an office belonging to the Board's chief accounts officer. The officer in question had evidently made some caustic observations about the impermissible expenses incurred by the chairman, who belonged to the Indian Administrative Service, on a just-concluded foreign trip. The chief was enraged.
The CAO was a member of the Indian Audit & Accounts Service, and therefore not technically responsible to the TBI chief. His noteworthy conscientiousness notwithstanding, the powers-that-were in New Delhi decided to move the 'offending' officer – not to a higher post, but out of the office. In so doing, they chose to save the bumptious IAS officer, who subsequently made off quite nicely: he retired as a departmental secretary, and is now on the board of governors of a well-known management institute. The media failed to report even a hint of what was going on, with the TBI's faithful lackeys in the media giving blisteringly sunny coverage.
During a 1998 roundtable, N Vittal, the former head of the Orwellian-sounding Central Vigilance Commission (a government body created during the mid-1960s to address official corruption), launched a resounding indictment of the Indian bureaucracy. Bureaucratic corruption is "a low-risk high-profit area", he formulated, further describing it as a "neta-babu-lala syndrome" perpetuating a culture of scarcity of goods and services in India. He added that "this culture of corruption in turn makes India less competitive." Vittal himself, however, is a good example of the difficulty here. In practice, this high-profile public servant accomplished almost nothing in terms of curbing corruption during his time at the helm of the watchdog commission. Even after having received incriminating documents against the chairman and managing director of an ailing public-sector undertaking – the National Jute Manufacturers Corporation, the accumulated loss of which had crossed USD 650 million – no action was initiated from Vittal's secretariat.
Bureaucrats did not call the shots in pre-colonial India, even during the Mughal period. That changed when the British colonial administration gave the bureaucracy great power, and the mantle had passed on to the administrators and managers of post-colonial Southasia. Today, the 'bureaucracy' in India is actually a supra-political system, made up of well more than the common stereotypes – the desk clerks and the red-tape mentality. The big stick is wielded by a few people at the very top of any large organisation, including in the private sector. Unfortunately, despite possibilities to the contrary, the widespread presence of bureaucracy in Southasia continues to increase the probability of inefficiency, as well as the possibility of corruption.