State should own responsibility, not pass the buck

THE Indian State has not been the strongest and there are several reasons for feeble State capacity — paucity of funds and manpower, pork-barrel politics and multiple objectives without the wherewithal to achieve them. But during a crisis, every time the State has been pulled by the bootstraps, it has delivered when the promise was faint. The technical cadre, bureaucracy, the states and municipalities often rose to the occasion.

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What we have seen in New Delhi amid the second wave of Covid-19 is not just a collapse of a rickety system, but everyone running around like headless chicken. No longer do people look to the State, which has clearly betrayed the trust in failing to plan ahead during this pandemic. And perhaps more so because no plan was being made adequately, it left everyone to his own devices. Planning not only involves thinking in advance, but it also exponentially improves response. Right from the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century, emergency response has been based on a triage. This should have been followed by a priority scheme by which only the most serious cases are taken into the ICU and the rest handled either with oxygen or general beds or home quarantine. When triage is established and serious cases are taken in and monitored, panic is booted out of the window.

Mumbai’s pandemic management shows what could be done with triage, foolproof coverage, a centralised bed allotment( including that of the private hospitals), predetermined rates of treatment even for private hospitals rather than ‘first come, first served’ and laissez-faire. With that ecosystem, Indian jugaad, which is anti-management in essence, is elbowed out and predictability introduced into the system. Hospital admission is no longer based on your contact and influence, but on the severity of infection.

How did India lose sight of these approaches when Municipal Corporation Commissioner Iqbal Singh Chahal had already done it in Mumbai, Kerala had handled the problem with aplomb, and Tamil Nadu with competence? The ability to plan for ensuring efficiency somehow was missing in most places. All data put out was way off reality and there was underreporting by design. When the State starts encouraging data fudging, it starts believing in it. Eventually, the State was the victim of its own yarn-spinning. Complacency is inevitable when you are looking at wrong data points. The National Centre for Disease Control as well as many bio-statisticians believe that the Indian Covid figures are underreported by 20-30 times. This pandemic thrives off complacency.

The second issue was the unwillingness to hear anything unpleasant: advice which points out different implications for decision-making. Actually, a strong point made by a functionary was likely to draw instant punishment. Sane voices fell silent in the process. They were told in no uncertain terms what was to be done and their job entailed only detailing, which often meant acceptable English without contradiction. Instructions were coming so fast and furious that many orders were incomprehensible, if not contradictory. The initiative just vanished and so did the urge and obligation of the civil servants, doctors and scientific establishment to tell the whole truth. The system didn’t reward that, nor expected anything other than compliance. The survival instincts of these people is so strong that if tiger’s milk is required, something will be produced as tiger’s milk. That happened and what slowly diminished was independent thinking, honest advice and sticking one’s neck out if something was blatantly wrong. Four years back, I was told by an amicable Cabinet minister that under the Constitution, bureaucracy is only supposed to do whatever is ordered by the political executive. I humbly asked for the source and tried to disabuse him, but I sensed the thickening cloud on the horizon. The only surprise is that it rained much quicker than expected.

Thirdly, advice came not from accountable sources, but somewhere from the twilight zone of loyalty. As former Health Secretary K Sujatha Rao says, “the multiple prices of vaccines and delegation to the states, when the Government of India always bore the responsibility earlier as per the Constitution, could not have been the advice from civil servants.” A steamrolled civil service cannot perk up to discharge command function because its spine is broken.

When style becomes the content and triumphalism is the style, everyone learns in the system to work on the low-hanging fruit. Everything revolves around publicity and visibility, not problem sensing and problem solving. If the top brass says that the threat is gone, the system lowers its guard as the leadership style demands it so frequently that it has become a default response. If prioritisation is not indicated from the top, no one will take the trouble of being a contrarian to be punished finally. In the result, the system doesn’t have many who can argue and differ. They are there to take received wisdom. In essence, no system remains and a compliant bunch occupies positions of power.

Such kind of State abdication has its own ‘toolkit’ to face the downside. First evade, then shift blame to the states, then to the bureaucracy — its favourite punching bag. At the heart of this is the absence of any attempt to pull the sclerotic State out of the morass. But it puts the regime and its leaders in defensible position when the litmus test is deniability. But the State weakens many times more and the State capacity just withers away in the name of national glory and power.