Is aggressive nationalism bad?

Arundhiti Roy termed the movement for Lokpal Bill “as the props and the choreography, the aggressive nationalism…” Does she mean that it was the media on steroids that created and orchestrated this hype against corruption in high places? The reality is that media, the fourth pillar of democracy, should take the blame for having failed to keep the spotlight on corruption?  

Rahul Gandhi sought to reset nation’s expectation with his view that a single Bill could not be a silver bullet. Fair enough!  However, the young leader is yet to unfold his approach on how to attack this widespread malady.

Public Grievance as the barometer

Now back to the issue of general perception about corruption. This perception gains strength with administration’s failure in addressing public grievance promptly.  

Inordinate delays in providing services to citizens spawned a system of writing out and sending in “petitions” and, created a class of professional “petition writers”.   These petitions are seldom effective since public servants, whose job is to listen and act, often pay no attention.  Delay in redressing grievances strengthens a perception that money is required to grease the wheels of the official machinery.

Sending in grievance by individuals is actually a powerful means of keeping a tab on the delivery of services by any office.  Analysis of these petitions can provide a valuable feedback on work disposal and delays in an office. It can pin-point the subject matter, or the functionary, who attracts complaints like a honey pot!  

To be fair, several systems have been experimented with, starting from Citizen’s charter to Janta Darbars. Unfortunately none of those could last, mainly because of lack of visibility into the black box of bureaucratic decision making.

Governments have made several attempts to tackle the issue of redressing individual complaints.  Three decades ago Maharashtra adopted Sapt Padi (a Seven Steps) program that was very successful initially, but failed since it generated more work than actually speeding things up.  Andhra Pradesh reduced the 7 steps to a 3 step process, but not with much success.  Bihar created Janta Darbars, where the entire district administration went down to villages periodically, to resolve issues on the spot.

None of the experiments could scale due to the fact that Rules and Office Procedures did not keep pace with the burgeoning population and growing demand of services from the vast complexity of administration.  

Technology can come to the rescue to manage numbers. While modernizing decision making and record maintenance are indispensable, these will take time.  I am sure a bright young man will devise a system to track public petitions efficiently (by attaching preprogrammed RFID chip to petitions maybe). With such an automated  tracking in place, Head of an Office can keep a tab on the level of complaints being received about his subordinates, and, his superior can track the Officers own performance in settling grievances. This will provide an objective measure of accountability at all levels. Additionally this information could be made public to ensure that every citizen has the confidence that his complain has not been consigned to the waste paper basket.

A strong daylight, thrown into the gray area of disregarding public complaints, will not leave shadows for anyone to hide in.  The resulting transparency will reduce the level of outstanding public grievances, raise confidence in the system, and diminish the generic perception of corruption. This is probably why Team Anna chose redressing public grievance as one of their three new demands !

After all fear of cancer is sometimes worse that the disease itself.