BUREAUCRACY

  

Bureaucracy

God in His innate wisdom created the heaven and the earth. As he looked at it from the heaven the earth looked magnificent. In a sublime moment God created man. He put man in charge of his creation and entrusted him to nurture His majestic creation. Though He was single, God felt his protégé, man, needed a companion. God presented man with the woman he was to live with.

Everything went well. Mankind flourished on earth. When their numbers galloped, men wanted someone to rule over them in the earth itself. For them, the remote control of God did not augur well. Well, men had their rulers. The rulers were smart. They knew they could not rule over the whole world alone. They created the infamous bureaucracy.

Wherever you are you cannot free yourselves from the clutches of bureaucracy. They call it the system. The system perpetuates itself. People are mesmerized by the carrots of government jobs they dangle. Once the bureaucrats are in, they learn how to survive without doing anything concrete. Everything is absurd for them except their own affairs. They douse the creativity in man. They learn to scribble notes and push the files up and down and ensure nothing works.

The people are happy to pay taxes. Taxes are the income of the Government. The expenditure of the Government is two pronged. While one is the compensation of the government employees, the other is freebies handed over to the people. Developmental activities have no priority whatsoever.

People expect their rulers to partake in their joys and sorrows. The rulers would present themselves at all functions in the households, be it weddings or death or anything else. If calamity occurs the usual refrain of the people is that no Minister, MP, MLA or local body member ever cared to visit them. The rulers play game. They would visit the people and ensure that some assistance is provided to them. If death occurs on the roads due to poor maintenance of roads no one is bothered though taxes are meant to keep the roads in good condition. If public buildings, that collapse and kill people even though they should have been demolished eons ago, stands there unharmed due to the handiwork of the bureaucratic file pushers, it is the success of the system.

When disaster strikes the rulers are active. They shell out doles in the form of cash and lowly jobs that are mere pittances. It makes people contented.

Look at what happens in the much hated US of A. A doctor migrated to USA after finishing his MBBS in a medical college here. He worked hard. He acquired more and more qualifications. He was a top neonatologist. It was a successful career. But what he learned here did him more harm than good. When a child was airlifted to his hospital in a critical condition, he knew a blood transfusion alone would save the child from a certain death. He arranged the transfusion without obtention of the consent from the child’s parents.

Well, that was the learned doctor's undoing. The blood transfused was HIV infected. The child too became infected. In a landmark judgment the American Court saddled the poor doctor with a liablility of Rs.65.00 crore. The liability was reduced to Rs.5.00 crore on appeal, but with a single rider. The Doctor was barred from practicing neonatology in future. Since he was well qualified he turned to family medicine where he was highly successful.

When a ceiling fan in my church fell over me 23 years ago, an event that had incapacitated me for over a month, the prime concern of the authorities of the church was that I should not file for compensation and it seemed to us their sole agenda was to erase all traces of such a mishap. They never bothered to make any enquiries on how the unfortunate victim was making out or spare a  fraction of their precious time to pay a visit.

No one would admit that the floods of 2018 that had overran most of the districts in a state was a manmade disaster. But it indeed was. 

The files have to move for resolving issues, not to mire them in inextricable webs.

The bureaucracy today is not at all accountable to anyone except  in ensuring the perpetuation of their own welfare. The people who prop them up and sustain them are of no consequence to them

All this could drastically be altered if the compensation for the suffering of  people is hiked to much and much higher levels if it is caused through obvious or deliberate neglect  by the bureaucracy. The Government would then have to  decisively act when it is mandated to shell out  the compensation not cosmetically in bits and bits, but in crores and crores. 

The faster the retribution, the fastetr the largesse would reach  the deserving for a change. 

We look for the dawn of such a wonderful day.

Will it happen when we are alive?