Indian Executive: Rare Intellect Reporting to Popular Morons
The highly disparate entry processes — Easy and non-existent for the Elected while Wringing and strenuous for the selected — for 2 hierarchies of the Executive Organ of Governance is taking the toll on the machinery as well as the citizenry of the country. Immediate remedial measures are need of the hour.
The ‘Executive’ Organ of the Indian government is the one charged with executing the governance on behalf of the elected Government. This organ comprises of 2 distinct categories of personnel based on the process of entry and process of the awarding of their responsibility — the selected ones which form the Bureaucracy and the elected ones which form the Council of Ministers.
Together, this arm functions to deliver Governance for the entire country. Therefore it is expected the entry criteria and the process they undergo before giving them their responsibilities must be challenging and must screen the character, education, criminal background on as much as objective criteria as possible.
While the set of entry barriers for the ‘selected’ ones are both challenging/towering/wringing, it is virtually non-existent for the ‘elected’ ones. What’s even more mind-boggling is the hierarchy — the highly screened selected ones report to the unscrutinized elected ones.
To appreciate the gap between the level of scrutiny of these 2 classes, let’s compare them on the basis of their Eligibilities — Education, moral, criminal history, and their selection process — which these 2 classes are subjected to.
BUREAUCRACY: THE SELECTED ONES
Here, the focus shall be the ‘Joint Secretary level’ from among the ‘All India Service’ which can be said to form the machinery of Central Executive and are key to shaping policies and framing implementation methodologies of legislation or fulfillment of Governance objectives:
1. Citizenship:
The person must be of Indian Citizenship.
2. Age:
The candidates shall be older than 21 years but must not be over 32 years for the General category
3. Educational Eligibility:
The candidates must possess a Graduation degree from a Central University / State University of India.
4. Criminal History:
No criminal case shall be pending at the time of appointment. The character and criminal background are verified by Police, Intelligence Bureau, and Special officers.
These criteria make one eligible to ‘Apply for’ the selection process — known as the Civil Services Examination (CSE) for entry into one of the All India Services:
5. Selection Process:
Around 10 lakhs (1 million) eligible ones apply for undergoing the selection process — the CSE, conducted by Union Public Service Commission (UPSC). It is easily one of the most rigorous screening exercises in the world right now. Let us have a quick look at some of the extraordinary aspects of this process:
a. The Screening is a 3 stage process — comprising of an Objective Preliminary Exam followed by a Subjective Mains Examination followed by an Interview:
b. The selection process spans for around a Year — yeah that right.
c. The total duration alone of the exam itself is 31 hours (excluding the interview) for a total of 3025 marks (Prelims — 400, Qualifying language papers — 600, 7 Mains Papers — 1750, Interview — 275)
d. Exam Design — It is designed to test both the objective width of knowledge as well as the subjective depth of wisdom of the candidates — from easily the vastest syllabus of any examination in existence today.
The candidates are expected to know, opine, comment, critically analyze on subjects ranging from History of civilizations of different parts in the world, Geography, Contemporary Polity, Science of Governance, International Geo-politics, Advances of Sciences and Technology in different fields; to Ethics, Integrity, and Aptitude.
To sum it up: They should know the past, present and expected future of all things which has been seen, discovered, invented or imagined by human capabilities till date.
This is followed by an Interview for 45 mins to 1 hour by an elite panel comprising of 5 of the senior-most Civil servants, which tests the confidence of the candidate in their ability to communicate their vast library of knowledge.
The combined marks of the Mains examination and Interview is utilized to prepare a list of ‘recommended’ candidates.
The seats for General Category candidates for getting into the AIS are around 150.
The final selection is subject to clearing the Physical Examination and verifications of declared Educational and Criminal Background by the candidate.
The top 150 screened out of this grueling multi-stage screening process enter the All India Services.
But if one thinks that they are handed the reins of the governance right away i.e. posted as a joint secretary in one of the ministries of the Executive machinery — well, they are in for a pleasant surprise.
The ‘selected ones’ undergo an extensive 2-year training program comprising of examination-based classroom pieces of training at premier institutes — LBSNAA, IGNFA, SVPNPA, along with an exploratory journey called Bharat Darshan to acclimatize and imbibe pride into candidates in the beauty of their own diverse country and diversity of fellow citizenry. It is a course designed for imparting and equipping the candidates to deliver Governance to the citizens as humble and proud servants.
Well, it seems now they are ready to take charge of Governance.
Right?
Quite Pleasantly, WRONG!!!
The trained candidates are then sent to their respective State cadres where they are their on-field, on-the-job training, directly interacting with the citizenry. Only after they have been tempered on the field for 16 years, they become eligible to join the Central Government Executive as joint secretary in one of the ministries of the Government of India.
The State Government is obliged — but not statutory liable — to allow 25% of these eligible candidates to take leave from their state cadres and join the Central Deputation Reserve. Out of this CDR, some go onto become part of the ‘selected’ Executive.
To Math it up — The ‘Selected’ part of the machinery are crystallized at the rate of 30 screened, selected, tempered, and proven ones out of a Million Willing Graduates
COUNCIL OF MINISTERS — THE ELECTED ONES
When we look at the screening process of the ‘elected’ ones, to whom the elite bureaucratic machinery reports, the experience is surprisingly underwhelming as well as shocking — and definitely, not in a pleasant way.
All MPs are eligible to be a Council of Minister, therefore, there is no separate eligibility criteria defined for a Council of Minister. So, we shall look at the eligibility to become an MP:
1. Citizenship:
The Person must be a citizen of India
2. Age:
The person must be 25 years of age; however there is no upper limit
3. Educational Criteria: Illiteracy is not a restriction;
· 1 MP has declared himself to be illiterate while 1 MP has declared himself to be just literate.
· 128 sitting MPs have educational qualification between Std 5th pass to Std 12th pass.
Source: ADR — Analysis of 2019 elected MPs
4. Criminal Background: No restriction;
· 233 of the winning MPs (43%) in 2019 Lok Sabha have self-declared criminal cases against themselves;
· among them there is worse group of 159 MPs (29%) with serious criminal cases against them –i.e. the most heinous of crimes including rape, murder, attempt to murders, kidnapping, crimes against women to name a few.
Source: ADR — Analysis of 2019 elected MPs
5. Selection Process: The candidate must be ‘the most voted for’ in their respective constituency.
However, this should not be mistaken for winning the majority of votes (>50%) of the constituency as the candidate needs to be just ‘more popular’ than other candidates contesting.
In a 3 way or 4 way divided constituency, a candidate wins the election despite receiving lesser than 50% votes. Let us look at the present Lok Sabha:
· 189 contesting candidates (or 35%) have become MPs despite receiving lesser than 50% votes of their respective constituencies
· 25 MPs have fewer than 40% votes of their constituencies
· 3 MPs of constituencies — Baramulla, Anantnag, Kokrajhar — have won fewer than 1/3rd of the votes
Source: Self-Analysis of available data
Therefore, to sum up, the screening process of elected part of the Government Machinery:
“A human born in India and has managed to exist on this earth for 25 years — who, in these years of his/her existence has not taken the effort to educate themselves, and is living an unrestrained life with no self-control making him/her venture into most heinous of crimes — is eligible for the selection process called as Elections — which judges the relative popularity of such candidates with respect to other such candidates.”
Age, if not accompanied by objective educational, criminal, financial and moral benchmarks, such as the ones kept for AIS bureaucrats, is literally just a number. It is not even the indicator of a person’s character — rather, it just a number denoting the duration of time passed from the birth of the person. Is passage of 25 years of time on Earth alone, without him/her taking any efforts, enough to equip a person to take charge of Governance?
Criminal history not being an impediment to their chances of becoming an MP is evident in the honesty — of these otherwise dishonest Netas — with which they declare their criminal history.
Therefore, the sole criteria set out for the people to be handed the reins of Executive governance is an arbitrary notion — ‘Relative popularity’.
The Impact:
The first victim of this twisted and unsound hierarchy are the bureaucrats — the ‘Civil’ Servants are generally treated as ‘Personal’ Servants by their mostly unlettered bosses.
This has led to an increasing disillusionment of this highly revered and resiliently earned job among the Civil servants. There has been an alarming number of suicides from the seemingly crème-de-la-crème service.
However, the larger and more serious damage is on the electorate-cum-citizenry. The heads of the executive reach there, despite being educationally and morally handicapped. This handicap devoids them off conscientious judgment and sound decision making — a requirement whose significance cannot be stressed enough for the rein-holders of Governance; and whose absence cannot be ignored in the size of scams of Government machinery irrespective of the donee of governance.
Furthermore, as established earlier, the sole eligibility for their selection is their relative popularity. Therefore, all their limited mental capacity and unlimited financial and criminal capacity is directed towards furthering of a base motive — ‘Becoming more popular than the other’.
This is invariably achieved by a dual strategy —
(1) Buying the ‘popularity for self’ along with
(2) conscious efforts to ‘de-popularising the others’, going to the extent of portraying the other candidates as dangers to communities.
The result of this unwitting strategy for gains of the vote has given birth to heinous and dangerous DIVISIVE COMMUNAL POLITICS — wherein the identity of the candidate is made to incite the identity of the electorate, and this incitement is then directed to the ballot. Betterment of citizenry and governance is rarely the talking point of Election Rallies of today’s vote mongers.
It is due to this ignorant pursuit of ‘relative popularity’ that Politics — the science of governance, has been reduced to the Business of getting votes in our country.
The Solution:
Once the root of evils has been diagnosed, the therapy becomes easy. The Executive machinery must undergo small but essential changes urgently:
1. As of now, the legislative and policy decisions are made by the unlettered popular elected, and passed on to the educated bureaucracy simply to drafting and frame those decisions in an unacceptable way. Therefore, their role is no more than glorified pencil pushers.
The wisdom resource of bureaucracy must be utilised more and more in decision making for the citizens.
2. The age criteria for the ELECTED executive — the MPs must be accompanied by these minimum criterion:
EDUCATIONAL AND PAST ENDEAVOURS:
a. They must be formally educated at-least till Standard 12th
b. They must possess some degree of mastery in any of the fields of human endeavours.
This mastery may be in either academic or non-academic fields. To prove this mastery, he might present his work either through documentary certificates OR in absence of it — human witnesses, who will testify for his mastery.
This must be done to ensure that they are capable of ‘performing’ — the field or degree doesn’t matter.
CRIMINAL SCRUTINY:
c. Any politician convicted in a cognizable offence OR has any pending serious criminal charges (even pending) at any point in his life must not be allowed to contest elections
As far as the citizens are concerned, they should acclimatize themselves about the criminal, educational and financial backgrounds of those contesting elections in their constituencies. Thanks to a non-profit conscientious organization like ADR, this information is very easily available on their websites and their ‘My Neta Application’.
An invisible eligibility criteria must be set by society themselves which will inform itself about the ones being rewarded with their votes. Only such a citizenry can prohibit itself from getting an inefficient Governance service provider.
