It is also democracy’s fault

Curse of seniority GURCHARAN DAS The Times of India Sunday, 02 July, 2006

During our socialist days we worried about economic growth but we were proud of our world-class judiciary, bureaucracy and the police. Now, we are ashamed of these very institutions while we take growth for granted. The brightest human beings on earth reside in India’s public services, but their fibre has been destroyed by the system’s inability to nurture the good and punish the bad.

This is, in part, due to the insidious seniority system run by small and safe men. When a person is promoted regardless of performance, he loses his will to excel. And so, what was once called the best civil service in the world has been ‘‘dumbed down’’. In 1938, 81 civil servants ran the central government and a thousand ICS officers ruled an undivided India of 300 million people far more efficiently because they had not succumbed to the disease of seniority.

It is also democracy’s fault. It creates the illusion that if we are equal in one respect we must be equal in every way. As citizens we are equal before the law with equal rights, but this sensible idea is subverted into a belief that if we are equal legally then we must be equal in other ways. Thus, we are shy to reward talented persons and punish non-performers. When institutions stop nurturing talent, then one falls into a sick world of “rishwat and sifarish’’ where lakhs of cases remain pending in the courts, where drinking water doesn’t reach the poor, where electricity board engineers connive to steal power and universities promote unsuitable professors.

Great nations are built by talented persons. Anyone who has run an institution or a business knows the 80:20 rule — 80% of the results are delivered by 20% of the people. Hence, smart managers reward the talented without de-motivating the rest. Talent is, of course, widely dispersed — it exists among dalits, brahmins and OBCs — and successful nations are able to spot and nurture it.