To say that in the under-developed nations of the third world one of the most formidable impediments to socio-economic development is the proclivity of the fence aka the government bureaucracy, to eat the crop, is an understatement. This is particularly true of post-independence India, which set a bad example to other newly independent countries of the post-colonial era by adopting the bureaucracy-driven Soviet model of development. Today India’s giant 22 million strong bureaucracy is the largest of any democratic country worldwide and has acquired a global reputation as the world’s largest kleptocracy.

The actual cost to the nation of maintaining this massive bureaucracy of 22 million (Centre plus states) is a closely guarded secret, but if the growing revenue deficit of the Union government is any indicator, it is huge. Recently EducationWorld was able to reveal that the annual salary and allowances bill of the Union government for its 4 million bureaucrats (Rs.63,000 crore) is more than double its outlay for the education of India’s 415 million children below age 18 (see EW cover story April).

Yet education is not a low priority item when it comes to the children of the nation’s pampered bureaucratic elite. Even within the thick-skinned establishment of the national capital where dipping into the public till for personal perquisites is a way of life, there is considerable indignation about a recent proposal to sanction an ad hoc grant of Rs.3.5 crore to the private Sanskriti School promoted by the Civil Services Society registered by the wives of top rank government officials. Indeed so great is the indignation that even the pro-establishment Times of India took time off from reporting the lifestyles of the rich and famous to editorially protest (May 25) this blatant abuse of office.

Special irony

As anyone who has had the slightest brush with the political class will vouch, gratitude — separate and distinct from sycophancy in which they excel — has never been a virtue of this flourishing tribe. Yet there is a special irony in the sarcasm and contempt which Union human resource development minister aka the Raja of Quota, has heaped upon the high-powered National Knowledge Commission, and in particular its chairman Sam Pitroda for warning against the adverse social and political fallout of legislating an additional 27 percent quota for OBCs (other backward castes). Despite the protest resignation of two of the six members of the Knowledge Commission, this advice hasn’t been heeded and the spectre of caste antagonisms which will divide the nation’s youth, has been resurrected on India’s campuses.

Quite obviously the Rt. Hon’ble minister’s memory is short. Therefore he needs to be reminded that following the assassination of the late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1989, he (Singh) who hasn’t won a direct election during the past two decades, had disappeared from the political stage into the limbo of oblivion where he would have remained but for the US-based Pitroda returning to India and master-minding the Congress Party 2004 election campaign, which triumphed against all forecasts and expectations.

In short, if the septuagenarian Singh received a new lease of political life and today looms large on the national stage because of his quota power plays, he owes it to Pitroda. But you wouldn’t expect gratitude from him, would you?