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The rot within IAS
Officers should stop dancing to tunes of politicians
by Kuldip Nayar
THE Indian Administrative Service (IAS) is at the apex to run the country's administration. It replaced the Indian Civil Service (ICS) which was an instrument in the hands of the British to rule over India. After Independence, there was a serious thinking whether there should be an all-India service at all. The states wanted persons from their own area to administer.But then Home Minister Sardar Patel was keen on having an all-India service to articulate the feeling of unity and maintain the diversities prevailing in the country. The service would also, Patel asserted, ensure that the Indian Constitution remained supreme in the medley of pulls by different states. Two all-India services, Indian Administrative Service and Indian Police Service (IPS), were constituted. Their members came to occupy top
positions in the states. This arrangement worked fairly well till the early seventies when the rot started due to the Centre's maniac effort to concentrate power and the states' ambition to play politics through civil servants. This has practicably nullified good administration. The IAS has become a glorified state service. The rulers use it in the
manner they like. In real, the Emergency is the watershed. The then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, suspended the Constitution and used the IAS officers to enforce illegal acts and suppress the critics. This was the time when the thin line between right and wrong, moral and immoral was erased. Only a couple of officers stood up against what was sheer dictatorship. Fear of punishment for disobedience made the service servile. It was once the steel frame but it has now turned into a seal frame. The Shah Commission, appointed to look into the excesses during the Emergency, has deplored how the bureaucracy caved in. The Commission has said: “The ethical considerations inherent in public behaviour became generally dim and in many cases beyond the mental grasp of many of the public functionaries. Desire for self-preservation as admitted by a number of public servants at various levels became the sole motivation for their official actions and behaviour.” The service has not recovered from the carrots dangled before it during the Emergency. In fact, it is going out of the way to placate the rulers. The latter, in turn, have rewarded those who did what the rulers wanted. The malaise is largely because of two reasons: one, the rulers do not respect the regulations and violate them to reap benefits for themselves and their parties; two, the IAS officers who are allotted to the states, have surrendered because of the threat of transfer or posting to an unimportant position. Therefore, it is heartening to see when IAS officers like Durga Shakti Nagpal from Uttar Pradesh and Ashok Khemka from Haryana stand up against the wrongs the rulers wished them to do. She has been suspended because of stopping illegal mining by the sand mafia. The Samajwadi Party, ruling UP and placating the Muslim electorate, has justified her suspension, saying that she had endangered the communal harmony by ordering the demolition of an outside wall
of a mosque. One, this is not true. Two, she was within her right to demolish any unauthorised structure on the government land. In a judgment, the Supreme Court has said that a place of worship should be pulled down immediately if the government land had been encroached upon. It is a pity that the Supreme Court rejected a public interest litigation (PIL) petition challenging her suspension. The court is technically correct that it cannot interfere in matters between the government and the employees. The court had the opportunity to set right the rot. It should have realised the anger which swept through the country following action against the two officials. The support of IAS associations from some states and the trainees at Mussoorie to Durga evokes hope that the service, which has ingratiated itself with politicians, may begin to assert itself as was the case before the Emergency. The manner in which the three-member IAS officers’ committee endorsed the Haryana government casts shadow on the behaviour of the service. The nation still hopes that the bureaucracy will make up for the deficiencies which the politicians, particularly belonging to the ruling party in a state or at the Centre, have
created in the system. In many foreign countries, there is a committee for civil service supervising the suspensions, transfers and promotions of officials. A similar committee can be constituted in India as well. The task can also be entrusted to the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC), which is also the
recruiting authority. The service itself will have to do introspection if officers were to act only on the basis of self-promotion. Today when the common man does not get even what is rightfully due to him, he is disillusioned with the entire system. True, politicians will continue to keep an eye on the electorate, but the IAS cannot afford to fall prey to their designs. A public functionary must display a degree of vigilance and willingness to sacrifice. The Gandhi dynasty should draw a lesson from the example of Feroze Gandhi, son-in-law of Jawaharlal Nehru. Feroz Gandhi would take up cases of corruption in Parliament, even to the embarrassment of Nehru. He was so upright that he did not even live at the Prime Minister's house but had a separate bungalow to which he was entitled as a member of Parliament. It is another matter that Feroze Gandhi's son, Rajiv Gandhi, got the atmosphere contaminated when, as the Prime Minister he bought the Bofors guns. Corruption of the dynasty has not lessened either in tone or tenor. Robert Vadra, son-in-law of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, has created a stench. Coming back to the IAS, its name is in the mud. It must retrieve itself not only for the sake of the Durgas and Khemkas, but also for the public which is still hoping against hope that the service will not dance to the tunes of the rulers. That is how the democratic structure in the country can be made
safer.
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OPED
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Geddes' 1918 Indore report — space and abstraction
There is upheaval besetting everyday spaces in cities — with imposing gates and fortified colonies. Is this the expression of evolution of our civic sentiments? Or, are our spaces shaped by the "contrasts of the moods" of our mind?
Venugopal Maddipati
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a time when the dwindling of solidarities becomes plainly visible in an upsurge in the number of compound walls and gated conclaves in the Indian cities, one can easily see the relationship between the changes in a city's social mood and changes in its architectural fibre. It was never so transparently self-evident before. One can begin to forget how, once upon a time, the commensurability between changes in a city's social temper, and its physical fabric, was not so much immediately palpable, as much as it was to be strenuously established and made explicit. Patrick Geddes, the acclaimed, Scottish evolutionist and urban planner, who also visited and stayed in India in the early part of the twentieth century, for instance, went to great lengths to bring some much needed visibility to the ways in which the reorganization of a people's thinking, resonated in a reorganization in the shape and form of the spaces they inhabited. Be it in his writing on such cities as Perth, Edinburgh, Dundee, Dunfermline and Aberdeen, or, for that matter, in the many town-planning survey reports he prepared in India between 1915 and 1925. Geddes painstakingly explained how the upheavals besetting everyday spaces in cities, were expressions, even if only subconsciously, of the evolution of the civic sentiments and the rationale of its inhabitants.
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Old palace, Indore, in 1912 |
And yet, however discerningly Geddes may have drawn a comparison between the evolution of spaces and the evolution of civic sentiments and rationale in his writing, what continues to remain a matter of confusion is how he, for his own part, oriented himself towards the idea of space. Did Geddes think of space principally as an outward canvas to be tinted in the hues of the inner transformations of reasoning minds, or more specifically, in the hues of what he once called the "contrasts of the moods" of people? Or, on the contrary, did the nature of the canvas itself, or more specifically, the nature of the space itself impinge, in his comprehension, upon the reasoning or the moods of people, and transform or disproportion them? Space, a reflection of mind
 Sir Patrick Geddes (1854 - 1932) was a Scottish biologist, sociologist, geographer, philanthropist and pioneering town planner. He is also known for his innovative thinking in the fields of urban planning and sociology. He introduced the concept of "region" to architecture and planning and coined the term "conurbation."Geddes' work in improving the slums of Edinburgh led to an invitation from Lord Pentland (then Governor of Madras) to travel to India to advice on emerging urban planning issues. In Gedde's words, "Town Planning is not mere place-planning, nor even work planning. If it is to be successful it must be folk planning. This means that its task is not to coerce people into new places against their associations, wishes, and interest, as we find bad schemes trying to do. Instead its task is to find the right places for each sort of people; place where they will really flourish."
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That Geddes, to some degree, prevaricated between these two simple, but nevertheless distinct philosophical orientations towards space, is somewhat evident in his 1918 text, Town planning towards City Development: A Report To The Durbar Of Indore. In that report, which he wrote in two volumes in preparation for his own proposed improvement of Indore( now in Madhya Pradesh), at the behest of its then king, Maharaja Tukoji Holkar, Geddes observed how the map of the city served as a palimpsest for the evolution of it from a religious centre, to a place of government, and finally, to a centre of military and commercial power. These three distinct, successive phases in the development of an inner, local, civic perception of the nature of the city, found outward expression, as Geddes observed, in the gradual shift, over time, of situational emphasis within the precincts of the city -- from the area called Juni Indore, or old Indore, to Ara Bazar, located close to the old palace complex, and finally, to Fort Indore. Putting it somewhat provocatively in his report, Geddes asked " …has not our review and interpretation of this development, in its three main quarters, or rather successive towns, brought before us a succession of phases of rational and orderly extension, in which, at each period, the requirements of its own life have been adequately provided, and those of its past respected?" Evidently, the steady evolution of the city of Indore was not so much haphazard. Rather, the evolution was, as Geddes would argue, the result of an evolution in the manner in which space of the city was rationalized with respect to the past, and emergent requirements, at particular moments in time. And yet, quite apart from his emphasis on the evolution of the city as an outward symptom of evolving inner reasons, there is also the matter of Geddes' emphasis, in the report, on his own evolution as an urban planner. If, on the one hand, Geddes wrote with considerable confidence about the ways in which changes in civic dispositions could impress and leave a mark upon the space of the city, on the other hand, he was also at pains to express how the very experience of working in the spaces of towns, such as Indore, served to impress upon and disproportion his own inner, civic rationale. Much is evident in the chapters Geddes devoted to sanitation and drainage in the Indore report. Organic vs artificial growth Geddes had, as he observed in those chapters, been initially of the view that importing abstract, European drainage plans into India was a natural and necessary aspect of modernising the country's cities. However, upon learning about the considerable cost overlays entailed in imposing new drainage plans on these cities, within the framework of their pre-existing town-plans, Geddes came to realize the inadequacy of his own views regarding sanitation. The task of laying out a drainage plan, as he now saw it, was not to be left by town planners to the devices of drainage experts, after they had planned a city. But rather, he now saw how working out a drainage plan that was in keeping with the city's topography and its economy, was part and parcel of the task of town-planning itself. If in the past Geddes had been an unquestioning believer in the salutary influence of new, European drainage plans, now, as his own experiences in the spaces of Indian cities began to press upon him, he increasingly sought to go beyond thinking about sanitation in the abstract. He explored the ways in which modern sanitation could be integrated into a pre-existing town plan and topography, so as to make sewage, and storm water disposal a more viable economic proposition. Given Geddes' credentials as a town planner, one could, of course, be led to assume that he emphasised how his own thinking about sanitation had changed, because he wished to extend the brief of the discipline of town planning. And yet, a more careful scrutiny of the Indore report would suggest that Geddes was far more ambitious; through his writing he sought to draw attention to abstraction itself. So much is evident in the portions of his report devoted to the outlook tower he had proposed for construction on the Ghatio peninsula near the Krishnapura bridge in Indore, as a part of a larger library and museum complex that was to embody, in his understanding, "the intellectual centre and crossing-point of the city, and to be its educational focus and centre as well." Abstraction in architecture From the turret of this proposed Outlook Tower, one could be expected to discern in what Geddes identified as a mood of "new vividness," the immediate roofs and tree tops of the city, its rivers uniting into one, its houses, streets and markets, its busy circulation to and fro, its palace towers, its monumental dome and its spires. More significantly, on this high roost, Geddes further proposed a chamber with a picture of the engirdling natural landscape projected onto a central table by a wizard's glass or turning mirror and lens. In Geddes' understanding, this representation of the surrounding landscape, which was to forever transmute itself to the tune of the passage of time, the gathering of clouds and storms and the attendant shifts in aspects of light and shade, was to surpass the work of the most sensitive painters of the time. On the one hand, then, Geddes demonstrated how adhering to the writ of a pre-existing topography was a more economically viable proposition than imposing an abstract European drainage plan upon the city. On the other hand, in the context of the outlook tower, he sought to demonstrate the limits of abstract representationalism as such. The appeal of what he called "the many coloured world of man and nature" as made visible through the wizard's glass in the outlook tower, was, as Geddes saw it, far more prepossessing than the appeal of an abstract, painterly representation of it. Withdrawal from outer world And yet, however much Geddes may have railed against abstraction, he was never entirely able to do away with it. In the corner of the roof of the outlook tower, for instance, Geddes proposed a small cell which was to remain, he observed, "without disturbing windows." In this space, which was to be a redoubt for abstract philosophers, or what he identified as the space of the "in look" the artist, according to Geddes, "withdraws from the outside phenomenal environment, and creates his picture, and his imagery seizes him." One wonders, then, to what extent such a space of meditation, in which the idioms of thought and intellectual expression may have been preserved from all impressionability, seized hold of Geddes and disproportioned his conception of the history of the spaces of Indore and his experiences within that town as a planner? Indeed, to what extent did the inward cell of a space of an isolated, sovereign, unchanging self, begin to refract or tint Geddes' observations and insights, in the limited hues of an abstract philosopher's imagination? These perhaps are questions which can serve as a turbulent canvas or a backdrop for the difficult urban transformations of our own peculiar time. The writer, an eminent architectural historian, is a Nehru Memorial Fellow.
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