Hail the note maker (pun intended)

Well, this has been discussed on this blog earlier –

here,

here, and

here.


Mr P Lal, IPS, provides some more insight into the issue in a middle that appeared today in ‘The Tribune’ which is worth reproducing :

The babu and the bureaucrat

P. Lal

IAS officers generally take umbrage at being called babus! They prefer being referred to as bureaucrats.

But who is a bureaucrat? And who is a babu?

As commonly understood in India, a babu belongs to a lower echelon in the official hierarchy. A clerk in an office may be referred to as a babu, and a head-clerk as the bada babu giving the latter a touch of respectability.

Historically, however, bureaucracy emerged as a dominant mode of human organisation in factories, offices and industrial establishments, more than 300 years ago in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. It proved to be an effective tool of management in business organisations, factories and industrial empires. Thus, the bureaucracy was born in the private sector and effortlessly travelled to the government sector where, too, it showed its efficiency, deliverd goods and services and conformed to rules. By doing so, it acquired power. One who held an office in the system came to be known as a bureaucrat.

Thus, the branch manager of a bank or the Chief Medical Officer of a district is as much a bureaucrat as a Deputy Secretary in a ministry or the SHO of a police station.

Max Weber, the political thinker and social scientist, who researched ‘bureaucracy’ extensively in private and government organisations, prophesied its triumph and declared its three important characteristics to be permanence, hierarchy and a division of labour.

The element of permanence led C. Northcote Parkinson to propound, as far back as 1957, his famous law: “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” He deduced as a corollary that there was little or no relationship between the work and the staff for its execution. Therefore, the rise in work-force would be much the same whether the volume of work were to increase, diminish or even disappear. To prove his point, he showed that the men in the colonial office in London increased from 372 in 1935 to 450 in 1939, to 817 in 1943, 1139 in 1947, and 1661 in 1954, whereas the size of the British Empire shrunk rapidly.

But, who is more important — the babu or the bureaucrat?

‘The law of inverse importance’ is relevant in this connection. According to it: “Exceptions apart, the real importance of a functionary in a bureaucratic organisation in regard to the nature of decision on a case, is inversely proportional to the rank that he occupies in that organisation.”

Thus, a note put up by an assistant, in a majority of cases, would be approved by the competent authority who is mostly an officer-bureaucrat who would just initial the file ( a more practical-minded one may write ‘ not approved’, to be changed, at an ‘opportune’ time, to: ‘note approved’). If the assistant doesn’t put up the note, there is no way a decision can be taken. And, therein lies his power!

A record-keeper clerk is even more important than the assistant, though lower in hierarchy. It is he who maintains the files, puts up the PUC (paper under consideration) and adds the precedent case files. He can make the fresh receipts (PUCs) disappear, make the whole files perform the vanishing trick or only such pages of them as are inconvenient. He can add precedent cases — favourable or unfavourable — depending on which party he wants to favour. After all, the decision makers find it safe to tread the path shown by precedents.

So, officer-bureaucrats (in all bureaucracies), cheer up. There is nothing to crib about being called babus!