The Hindu Business Line : <I>The paperwork curse </I>

Aficionados of the computer, the Internet and the intranet used to gush at one time that they had ushered in the new phenomenon of a paperless office. All work would be done on data and views exchanged on the computer screen and goodbye to copious notes for taking the most ordinary decisions. Indeed, the fully wired future would be, they said, not only paperless but without any need for brick-and-mortar edifices as well for doing one's work.

Well, there is no sign of the tyranny of paper having lost its oppressive character. There has been no downward trend in either sale of reams of paper for office use, or the volume of paperwork generated or the `hard copies' carried by surface mail.

The reasons are plain: The proliferation of computers is not yet such as to make for universal access. Pinning down responsibility for the contents of e-files is problematic. Deviations from prescribed norms and methodologies, which may eventually result in irregularities or malfeasance, are easier to trace with the help of paper trail.

It is impractical, if not imprudent, to do away with the customary modes of preparing certain documents such as contracts, court cases, records of negotiations and the like because of their formal or legal nature.

Human nature is uncomfortable with something as ethereal and ephemeral as e-files, since whole arrays of them can be manipulated or deleted by the click of the mouse; it is far happier dealing with piles of concrete, tangible and touchable documents.

Compulsive itch

In India, there is the additional curse of the colonial hangover of writing long-winded notes on the subject-matter, however trivial, of any paper that lands in government offices. In fact, officials during that era felt insecure without there being records of every decision. So much so, there is the story of one of the Collectors asking the Chief Secretary's permission to destroy useless old records and the dignitary replying, "Permission granted. But keep copies!"

Some out-of-the-box thinkers among the British bigwigs did find this compulsive itch to fill files with endless notes an obstacle to taking fast decisions. The outburst (of course, recorded in a file on May 24, 1902) of Lord Curzon, India's Viceroy in the beginning years of the 20th Century, is famous as the `Round-and-round Minute' because in it he came down heavily on the bureaucracy's habit of beating about the bush and going round and round and up and down and sideways without ever coming to grips with the issue.

"The real tyranny that is to be feared in India", he wrote, "is not the tyranny of the executive authority, but that of the pen... Every matter from the smallest to the greatest becomes the subject of written memoranda by officials of every grade. Small wonder that those at the top of the hierarchy whose duty it is to reach decisions and issue orders find their energies sapped and their initiative impaired by the effort of digesting the mass of heavy and unappetising fare placed before them.

"Unless they be men of more than ordinary initiative, the disposal of the bulky files of papers which pour into their offices with monotonous regularity becomes their sole ambition. Their work becomes wooden and mechanical...The result of all this is that while an immense amount of time and energy is consumed in the consideration of the various matters calling for disposal, little progress towards solution is made..."

Not a word of that needs to be changed 105 years after it was written.

B. S. RAGHAVAN