Onions have the capacity to bring tears to the eyes of the average consumer with their prices liable to go off the charts from time to time. They certainly did over the last six months or so. The question then is, is the Collector, the head of the district administration, responsible for keeping a check on the price?
To most, the proposition would seem so ridiculous that it is not even deserving of a response. Mind you, these collectors are armed with powers under the Essentials Commodities Act with its stock controls and record keeping of inventories and such other stipulations. But, as everyone knows, these are incapable of being administered in any meaningful way; and even if they were, there is no guarantee that prices would come down if the problem is one of a serious shortfall in production.
That brings us to the more fundamental question of difference between public administration and general management. Civil servants are, no doubt, very good at administration. But are they also good at management? Is the work of a civil servant administrative in nature or managerial in scope?
Price control
If they are to be seen as managers it stands to reason that they should be able to control prices, in the sense that managers are supposed to make actual outcomes conform to some standard. At the least, they should have been able to anticipate the price rise so that somebody higher up could have come up with a response that has the desired outcome.
Being able to anticipate the future course of action is the key. Management theory tells us that for a manager to be able to control actual outcomes to certain pre-determined standards, he should first be able to measure performance. Not just at the final point of an activity but measurement of the whole chain of activities which finally culminates in the output, which is required to conform to a certain standard.
As a production manager if you are charged with the responsibility of producing 1,000 automobiles, it is not enough if you have information on the actual output of cars at the end of the day. You should have information on the output in the morning, afternoon and evening, so that the production performance at the end of the day doesn’t come as a surprise.
As real-time information flows in, a manager is able to dynamically allocate resources so that output at the end of the day is made to conform to the target. Not only that, the manager should be able to get data on production of vehicle parts, material procurement and worker absenteeism, so that the process of dynamic resource allocation, a key dimension of managerial performance, is kept up. This is where the civil servants might come up short.
Outdated information
Data released by the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperation recently are a good case in point. The document gives details of acreage of cultivation of different crops (horticulture, floriculture, pulses, oilseeds, and so on) and the likely output.
While I was swelling with pride at the fact that my tax rupees are being put to work, I soon realised that the entire data related to the agricultural operations in the country was not for the current fiscal (2015-16) but had to do with the performance of the farm sector in the year previous to that (2014-15). If this was not distressing enough, delving a little deeper into the data made it doubly so.
The statement spoke of it being an estimate that had already gone through two earlier revisions. One presumes there would eventually be a final version and hopefully that would be out before the current year is over. But it wouldn’t have mattered.
For shortages have already manifested in the economy and prices have already shot through the roof and consumers at the lowest strata of the society have been made to pay the price, both literally and figuratively over the last six months or so. In other words more than half way into the next financial year, the Government at the Centre or, for that matter, States too have had no clue that onion output could fall short by as much as 2 million tonnes.
Notional control
This, then, is the problem. Civil servants have simply no opportunity to perform the role of a manager because one of the aspects of managerial functions — namely ‘control’ — requires timely information flow and the Government system of data gathering and collation into meaningful information is so pitifully slow as to be of little relevance to the civil servant-manager or his being able to perform a ‘control’ function.
The functions of the State in a pre-Keynesian world revolved mainly around maintenance of law and order and enforcement of contracts between citizens and other entities such as companies. The maintenance of law and order required the administrator/manager to be physically present at the scene of action. In other words, he was the data gatherer and processor of information.
The enforcement of contracts too, with its emphasis on judicial system and pronouncing judgments on disputes, did not put a premium on data gathering and its processing into meaningful information. But the role of the State and the Government machinery have expanded to reflect public aspirations for a better life.
Unfortunately, the creaky colonial system of data gathering and the glacial speed with which such data is processed have left civil servants with little or no means of refashioning themselves as managers to the extent that the job requirements impose on them. This is not to say that the civil servant’s job has no managerial aspect. It is just that the babus are, quite often, reduced to responding to events in a way that is not unlike that of a fire brigade combating a fire accident.