The Hindu Business Line : Needed, a National Management Service

If the Government is serious about the Millennium Development Goals, it should shift from emphasis on administering rules to managing objectives. It should provide freedom to individual officials, however limited, to experiment. Above all, it must get away from the obsession about rules; the rule must be the servant not the master. Every official should have the right to ignore a rule if that promises better results, ssays P. V. Indiresan.

CONCLUDING THIS four-part series on Millennium Development Goals, we will discuss some lacunae in our administrative set-up that are likely to hinder the realisation of those goals. To illustrate the issues involved, we will use the case of illiteracy as an example.

Halving illiteracy is one of the Millennium Goals. Therefore, there is, understandably, considerable pressure to enhance the budget for elementary education, and to add more schools. However, there is already a school in every village. Increasing the number of schools to smaller hamlets is unlikely to make much of a difference because most poor children drop out of existing schools. Those that are not poor avoid going to those schools; they prefer private schools instead.

It appears we have misunderstood the nature of the problem. From the administrative perspective, gaps in the distribution of schools stand out. That a number of hamlets are without schools becomes a matter of concern. It appears logical that if only more schools are added (that is, more inputs are given) illiteracy will come down. On the other hand, from a management perspective, high dropout stands out as the crux of the problem. It then appears logical that if only dropout rates could be brought down, illiteracy will come down to manageable levels. That is the difference between input-centric approach and output-oriented approach.

Administrators increase the number of schools; managers try to improve the attractiveness of existing schools. Managers look for quality of output; administrators concentrate on quantity of input.

Second, our government looks for faults and uses punishment as a major tool of control. It is no accident that we have large and powerful institutions such as the CAG, the CBI and the CVC. All three look for who all they can punish; they are not interested in any one who deserves to be rewarded.

The Government has no positively-oriented institutions to complement these three negatively oriented ones. It has no system for identifying best practices in fund management, to investigate where good people are to be found, or to look for innovations. Our Government is eager to highlight failures; it is uninterested in successes.

Recently, a CAG condemnation of the IITs for the way they fixed pay increments of Assistant Professors was headline news both in the print media and on TV. The conduct of the seven IIT directors was condemned for wrongly fixing the salaries of assistant professors leading to an overpayment (in the CAG's view) of about Rs 4 crore. If the CAG had been concerned about management, it would have enquired how competent were the assistant professors who were recruited, not how much they were paid. In American universities, the issue raised by the CAG will be considered laughable. There, the government does not fix salaries for everyone; heads of departments negotiate faculty salaries individually. It is common for an assistant professor in one department to be paid more than full professors in some other. In US universities, the quantum of salary is a trivial issue; attracting the best persons is the critical one.

To solve the quality problem, managers search for best practices. Confronted with the question of illiteracy, they will look at the most sought-after schools. Then, they will find that good schools are relatively large, and that students travel long distances to reach the school. The government takes the school where the children are; good schools draw children to wherever it is best to locate their school. Which is more important: Proximity of a school even if it is poorly managed or a school with good teachers even if it is some distance away from where the children reside?

Consider the proposition: The country needs better schools and not more schools. This will appear obviously correct to most laypersons. Yet, many vociferous educators insist that it is the fundamental right of every child to have a school within walking distance. So, they have forced the government to start many tiny schools with next to no facilities merely to check that they do not have to travel far. They forget that their own children or grandchildren travel long distances to study in reputed schools. They overlook the fact that dropouts are highest in single-teacher schools.If we are really serious about the Millennium Development Goal of full literacy, there is no option but to give up this fruitless policy of adding more and more schools irrespective of how poorly they perform. Instead of having ten single-teacher schools, we should consider replacing them by one ten-teacher school. Critics will then demand to know what guarantee is there that ten-teacher schools will function well. They will cite instances of single-teacher schools that have produced very successful students.

True, there is no guarantee that all ten-teacher schools will function well, and better than exceptionally good single-teacher schools. However, on an average, due to mutual social pressure, due to intellectual interaction, or even due to mere physical support of one teacher substituting for an absent one, ten-teacher schools are likely to function better. They may not be perfect but hold better promise.

Critics will also object that children cannot travel far. To remedy that problem, let the government organise transport. This suggestion too will be objected as expensive. Which is more expensive: Adding more schools where teachers do not attend and where students drop out disillusioned, or alternatively, organising cycle-rickshaws to transport them to schools that can be better supervised? A back of the envelope calculation indicates that transporting elementary school children would cost about Rs 5,000 crore a year, 0.25 per cent of GNP. The same critics want the government to increase education expenditure by 3 per cent of GNP; then, this expense is small.

As critics are unlikely to be so easily silenced, why not try the idea experimentally in a few places? Unfortunately, there is no system in the country to try such experiments unless a body as high as the Cabinet approves. As that is a tortuous process, new ideas, rarely if ever, get experimented at all.

Rule-bound administrators will not accept even small changes unless the results are perfect; even then, they will have qualms. Result-oriented managers will accept even drastic changes if they hold out promise of improvement. The former are risk-averse; will not countenance even occasional failures. The latter are risk-takers; they are satisfied if, on balance, there is prospect of some improvement. The former will not even experiment; the latter will be trying out improvements all the time.

This kind of scenario has been elaborated to emphasise the lacunae in our system in handling futuristic projects. It is an axiom that every improvement needs change; if there is no change, there can be no improvement at all. It is also an axiom that every change comes with new costs. On that count, there are two options: Declare that no new cost is acceptable or compare the cost-benefit ratio of the new system with that of the old one. That comparison can be made systematically only after trying out the new system. We are back to square one because no official in the administration is free to experiment without risk of damaging his career and of drawing the baleful attention of the CAG, or even the CBI and the CVC.

Ten-teacher schools may or may not be better than single-teacher ones. We will never know for sure unless we experiment with them. That is true of all innovations. We have a system that is not receptive to change, certainly not radical change. We have a system that offers no encouragement for individual initiative. Such a system is unlikely to reach tall peaks. China is forging far ahead of us not because it is a dictatorship but because it has decentralised innovation. We too are doing well only in those fields where government regulation is least.

It should have a system of rewards that will outweigh the terror the threat of punishment inspires. Above all, get away from this obsession about rules: The rule must be the servant not the master. Every official should have the right to ignore a rule if that promises better results. If India wants to create a brave new world, it should replace the plodding fear-driven Indian Administrative Service ever looking backward over the shoulder, by reward-driven confident forward looking National Management Service.

An almost true story: Students who fail examinations tend to think of committing suicide. In Ahmedabad, drowning in the Kankaria Lake is a favoured option. On the day school results were declared, one thoughtful Police Commissioner posted constables all round the lake with strict instructions not to let any youngster near the lake. One such constable noticed a miserable youth going to the lake.

He enquired of the youth whether he had failed the school examination. The miserable youth said no, I have failed the BA examination. The constable let him go and drown himself. It was concluded that as the constable had obeyed instructions implicitly, he had committed no fault.

(The author is a former Director of IIT Madras. Response may be sent to indresan@vsnl.com)

(This is 151th in the Vision 2020 series. The previous article was published on May 30.)

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