The author belongs to the 1991 batch of the IAS. She has served in various posts in the 22 years since then but, going by this book, it is her posting as Collector at Karimnagar in Andhra Pradesh that appears to have left the deepest impression on her. Why isn’t poverty going away even though we are trying so hard, she asks. The fault, as Cassius told Brutus, is not in her stars but in that she is an underling.
Until the 1970s, collectors were supposed to uphold law and order and, when needed to, supervise relief works in the aftermath of natural calamities. But then came the full, frontal attack by some economists, notably B.S. Minhas of the Planning Commission, on the failure of two decades of planning to reduce poverty.
This attack coincided with Indira Gandhi’s quest for political credit as a messiah of the poor. She used it well, at least from her point of view.
An impossible task
The onus of ensuring that she was thus elevated to the Messiah status fell on the young shoulders of collectors across the country. They often had less than 10 years of service. They might have been kings or queens in the district but in the system they were mere
Even otherwise, it was an impossible task, if only because of the sheer numbers of people involved. Add to that the normal workings of government comprising turf wars, foolish rules and plain callousness, and the result was that the quality of law and order as well as service delivery declined. As the Hindi saying goes, “ Dhobhi ka gadha na ghar ka raha na ghat ka .”
Dawra has done well to chronicle the travails of a well-meaning Collector. Her solutions are also worth paying some heed to.
For example, it makes no sense why the payment of crop insurance must require that large tracts are affected by a calamity. As she points out, hail can lay waste a few acres while leaving the adjoining areas intact. But no insurance is payable, it seems, to the farmer whose crop alone has been flattened.
Recommended reading
The book is full of such examples, as also of instances where the local politicians or the local bureaucrats, or both, collude to make sure nothing much changes.
For that reason alone it must become a required reading at Mussoorie, where civil servants are trained. If nothing else, they will at least know what to look out for.
The omnibus solution Dawra offers is not a new one: devolution of power to the local level. The community development programme of the 1950s, championed by S.K. Dey, which first Nehru and then his daughter decimated, was about this only.
I can do no more than to quote from the Hindu of February 11, 1960:
“Mr. S.K. Dey, Minister of Community Development and Co-operation, said in the Lok Sabha on February 10 that Government had decided to stick to the original target of bringing the whole country under the community development programme by 1963. Mr. Dey said that the U.N. Mission had made the suggestion for staggering the programme in India on the ground that the technical and administrative staff for implementing the programme was not adequate. The staff position has now improved and the Government were trying to make up for the loss of momentum by introducing such schemes such as ‘panchayati raj’ to maintain popular interest.”
Instead, of course, the IAS took over and that was that.