Make White Elephants Extinct

This article appeared on the front page of the Delhi-NCR edition of Times of India on 22nd April.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Mayawatis-mega-project-irks-Noida/articleshow/4432392.cms

Residents of a locality have about as much say in decisions on such projects as they have in deciding when it should rain. An elected representative, say M, ensconced comfortably in the state capital, presses the button of a remote control on a whim. One fine day, the residents of a locality wake up, and find themselves carrying M’s white elephant.

Swaraj can render such headlines redundant. The matter will never reach the Supreme Court ; it will be disposed off in the Mohalla Sabha or Ward Committee Meeting of Sectors 15A and 14A of Noida. Swaraj requires that the permission for all such projects, indeed any project that will affect the lives of the residents of a locality, be taken from the residents of the locality. Even if the permission is given, the Mohalla Sabha or Ward Committee will have the right to take it back if the project is affecting residents adversely.

The only just way to rule on the matter is : Let the people of the locality decide whether they want to remember the CM’s heroes at the cost of their environment. We don’t need the Supreme Court to make such judgments, all we need is local self-rule to settle the issue much before it becomes an issue.

One of the slogans for Swaraj says:

Kanoon ke kile se, kaise mitenge khot
Jab mohalle ke masle bhi jayenge Supreme Court

Conserve the environment of your locality without going to the Supreme Court. Make white elephants extinct. Support Swaraj.

www.lokrajandolan.org

What will make RTI work?

The vision presented in The Solution is probably too far removed from the current reality to find any immediate converts. So let’s consider how to apply the principle of participatory democracy to the simpler problem of making RTI work. I came across an article by Arvind Kejriwal (one of the people at the helm of the RTI movement) sometime ago. He mentions in the article that RTI is being throttled by the dubious decisions of Information Commissioners to deny information requested by perfectly valid applications. Every such decision has set a precedent based on which denials of RTI applications have become commonplace.

A simple fix to the problem is to involve public volunteers in the apellate process. The idea of a jury comprising such volunteers is applicable here as well. The Right to Information Act must be modified so that Information Commissioners have no option but to heed the jury’s opinion on the question of whether information can be denied in a particular case. The jury’s decision on whether to impose a penalty for denial of information must also be binding on the Information Commissioner’s office.

Volunteers for such juries can easily be mobilized from RTI applicants whose petitions are pending. The solution to the question of volunteers is similar to how the problem of limited supply in blood banks has been addressed : Give a bottle of blood to get a bottle of blood. Similarly, RTI applicants with pending queries must serve on the jury to get their queries responded to.

The question of whether the jury’s opinion can be trusted, should not be a worry. The jury’s powers should be limited so that they can only influence the decision to deny information, not the decision to provide it. Such limitation of powers is aligned with the interests of citizens, who have every reason to favor a transparent government. Also, as a practical example, citizen juries decide the outcomes of trials in America, and few can argue that the Indian legal system works better in the absence of citizen juries.

The modification of the RTI Act to include such a provision is an incremental step in terms of implementation: it should be feasible to generate the political will required for the amendment in a relatively short time. However, it has the potential to effect a fundamental change in the power balance between the state and the citizens. It is unlikely that the tail will wag the dog anytime soon. However, with the proposed change, the tail may soon hold its own when it isn’t in the mood to dance.

The Solution

A proposal that tackles the two fundamental flaws of the Indian system is described here, as a concrete example. The proposal outlines a skeleton implementation of a potent Right against Negligence Act.

An independent agency to register complaints of negligence is the first requirement. While it is recommended that each government department provide complaint registry services, granting the particular government department sole prerogative to register complaints ensures the defeat of the process at the hands of collusion. The independent agency ensures that forms and complaint books are always in print, and can be easily found without dispatching aides to the ends of the universe. A common man may not always be aware of which department to file a complaint against, especially because departments are so obsessive about jurisdiction. A single agency effectively virtualizes the many complaint redress services of the government into a single entity. This is a much desired effect, because the citizen’s complaint is against the government, and not the specific agency involved, so his complaint should get registered against the government. It should be the responsibility of the independent agency to classify and forward the complaint to the right organization within the government.

On receipt of a complaint, the concerned department is given a small amount of time (no more than a week) to respond to the complaint adequately. If the response is acknowledged as satisfactory by the complainant, the complaint can be removed from the list of pending complaints. Technology should be used to speed up the complaint resolution process wherever possible. Professionals may notice the allusion to a defect reporting system employed by companies to resolve issues that customers have with their products. A defect reporting system is a key component of the proposal. All important issues, even ones that government insiders generate, can be logged into the system (e.g. the breach in the Kosi embankment that was not repaired in time). The defect reporting system will then provide to the public debate a precise chronology of all government actions (or lack of them).

The defect reporting system, described so far, is merely the front end of a possible implementation of a concrete Right against Negligence. A chain reaction can only be initiated by the efficient registry of complaints, but to sustain it, the bureaucracy must be incentivized to resolve pending complaints speedily. A record of efficient complaint redress should attract positive incentives, such as bonuses and promotions. Tardy complaint response records should attract negative incentives, such as stagnation, suspension, or even dismissal. The question of how to identify the people within a department who deserve credit or censure for a particular complaint can be easily resolved by extending the use of the defect reporting system as a defect tracking system. A new complaint is always assigned to the manager of a division, who must either resolve the complaint or delegate it to his subordinates. The entire history of the complaint, including all re-assignments of ownership and present status must be recorded within the defect reporting system. How to manage all of this information efficiently is a well-solved engineering problem, and several solutions (even free ones) are available. These systems also support queries about each individual’s record of handling complaints. There are several details that can be provided with reference to the capabilities of such a system, but the bottomline is that the records of all public servants with respect to complaint redress can be efficiently stored in, and, accessed from, databases that public servants do not have easy access to corrupt for their own ends.

A final provision is proposed to ensure that the negligence complaint redress system does not get hijacked by public servants for their own interests. The intent of this provision is to empower people at all rungs of society to make the government machinery to respond to their needs. Periodically (and frequently), a negligence court shall be convened. A government official can preside over the proceedings of the negligence court, which will scrutinize the progress in the resolution of complaints. Representatives of each department, against which there are complaints pending, must also be present to report on the actions undertaken or planned for each pending complaint.

Most importantly, a jury comprising a few citizens, who have volunteered for the day, will record their views on the actions taken on the pending complaints. They will have the authority to question the representatives of the various departments on the actions (or lack of them) undertaken towards the resolution of a particular complaint (or a class of complaints). A key component of their duties will be to provide numerical scores on the sufficiency of action on the part of the government departments. These scores will be tied to the job incentives of public servants. For the conscientious execution of their mandate, the negligence jury members will have access to the records of the defect tracking and reporting system discussed earlier. The jury shall not be paid for their services, and no member shall serve on the jury more than once during a sufficiently long period of time (e.g. a month). The lack of financial incentives and discontinuity in membership are design features essential to counter collusion. The jury for the day will be constituted at random from the list of available volunteers, so that every volunteer stands a fair chance of participating in the negligence court. The composition of the jury should not be published to the government departments, so that no prior arrangements may be made with jury members.

Several more details with respect to how the jury should be constituted need to be fleshed out before any practical implementation of this proposal, but all implementations must adhere to the philosophy at the core of this provision : If every man/woman could be king for a day, and on that day his/her soul were relieved of all of the trappings and temptations of a king’s position, he/she would take the opportunity to the good that is possible with a king’s power.

The cynics might argue that citizens may not volunteer for such jury duty. The right question to ask is: When presented with an opportunity to, finally, be counted, how many would decline? It might be argued that uneducated people serving on the jury would wreck the system. When the system already places its trust in uneducated people to vote, and to make laws, how hard is it trust their instincts in this case? Besides, each jury’s opinion will be an average of its constituent members. Any unwarranted negative effect on the careers of public servants can also be discounted by considering the averages of opinions taken from uncorrelated juries over a relatively long period of time. The proposed system, in its worst case, where the jury is always untrustworthy and achieves nothing, is no worse than what exists today. The proposal guarantees today, and promises tomorrow, with a clear vision of how to achieve it.

It is time to trust the people to decide their own fate, instead of arguing that they are not ready for power. That is the precise argument that the British used to keep power out of the hands of Indians. It is time for the rulers of the day to step out of the way, and let the people deliver to themselves the Mahatma’s glorious vision of democracy, the Panchayati Raj, that sought to make every person a king at least once in his/her life, and by extension, rulers out of every person for their entire lives.

The Problem

A proposal for a practical Right against Negligence cannot be taken seriously without due reference to the elephant in the room, i.e. Right to Information. Right to Information, as it stands today, is both a success and a failure, albeit a partial one. It is a success because the passage of the Right to Information Act is a coming-of-age event for social activism in India. Where it has failed is in converting its capital of optimism, provided freely by the masses at the onset, into the radical transformation of the government that it promised. There are incremental gains, no doubt, with respect to the existing system, but the bureaucracy remains, by and large, stubbornly neanderthal. No doubt, every profound idea deserves requisite patience before it is dismissed as flawed on the basis of a flawed implementation. However, this is not a bad moment to introspect on the existence of a profound flaw in the idea; something that could prevent the realization of a sophisticated implementation in significantly less time than that required for the natural evolution of some of the beasts that occupy our high offices into something more human.

The despondency of most aware citizens towards the possibility of change using RTI suggests that such a flaw is well known, and oft stated. The officers responsible to ensure that requests of information are efficiently responded to belong to the same system that relieved itself of accountability, as something of an affected conceit, a long time ago. The cynical attitude held by the majority of informed Indians towards the success of a future movement, now that RTI is steadily leaking the fuel of hope, is not based on some fatalistic or religious notion. It is based on fairly sound inductive reasoning : All past measures to make public servants accountable have had only public servants vested with the power of cracking the whip, and have failed. All future measures will also have government officials at the helm, and hence, are destined to fail.

The logic of this reasoning is ruthless. RTI is yet another victim of an insurmountable problem, which is the bane of reasoning in several mathematical systems, called the Barber’s contradiction. In fact, the problem of accountability always has the Barber’s contradiction at the heart of its complexity.

Consider the following simplified problem, representative of the problem of accountability in a totalitarian state. Within a town, some of its citizens need to be assigned the role of police, under the following constraints:

1. No person can be trusted to police himself/herself

2. Every person must be policed.

3. The police can police everyone else who isn’t the police.

3. Only the police have the authority to police

The question of accountability is : Who polices the police? Given the problem constraints, the question has no answer, and hence, no satisfying assignment to the role of police. What doesn’t work in theory, doesn’t work in practice. It’s pretty easy to see why it is very likely that a common person would be dissatisfied with a totalitarian state.

The problem of accountability is rendered soluble in democracies by modifying the constraints that need to be satisfied to:

1. No person can be trusted to police himself/herself

2. Every person must be policed.

3. The police have limited, but sufficient, authority to police the citizens.

4. The citizens have limited, but sufficient, authority to police the police.

These constraints can be satisfied by a power-sharing contract between the police and the citizens. When power is divided in the right proportions, and the exercises of power by the police and the citizens are mutually exclusive (i.e. there is no conflict over who wields the authority in a particular case), no strong assumptions about the character of individuals need be made to ensure accountability.

In democracies, the typical exercise of power available to citizens is the act of voting for elected representatives to legislative bodies. There are other typical acts of power, exercised individually, such as seeking judicial remedies to encroachment of rights. There are some atypical acts of power that are not common or pervasive in all democracies. An example is jury duty, wherein a random sample of the population, comprising of individuals not related to the parties affected, decides the outcome of a trial. Other examples are elections for non-legislative positions such as county sheriffs, and referendums on issues of national importance.

So how does our version of democracy stand up to the pure logic of the problem of accountability? Two fundamental flaws in the design of our system are self-evident:

1. The limited authority to police the police is not sufficient: Public servants are accountable to other public servants, who in turns are accountable to other public servants, and through seemingly infinite layers of authority, finally accountable to politicians. Considering the basic unit of change in the system as the election for a single legislative post, the power over change that is directly exercised by an individual is 1 divided by the size of the individual’s constituency (around 0.00001 for a constituency of 100,000), once in five years.

Access to judicial remedies bolsters this number somewhat, but the smallness of its magnitude remains unshakable. Judicial remedies, are expensive both in terms of money and time. To make matters worse, extensive safeguards protect public servants against prosecution for actions (or the lack of them) performed in the line of duty. RTI, and some other measures, attempt to work within the same system, as discussed earlier, and hence, do not significantly empower the public.

2. No provisions to prevent collusion: Once public servants and politicians collude, the severely constrained authority available to the public to police the police is further weakened.

It has become fashionable to suggest that one of the causes of India’s myriad problems is too much democracy. The real reason, based on the reasoning above, is quite the opposite: Too little democracy. It is the root cause that allows other factors, like religion, caste, or culture, to become factors.

All future movements that seek to usher in the hitherto elusive era of accountability must be armed with a clear understanding of what they seek to defeat. Therefore, they must define concrete proposals to rid the system of the two fundamental flaws discussed. A movement that has a sound vision of how to tackle both these flaws together is worth the cost of the revolution required to make it succeed.

Ass Wide Open

After a great deal of introspection and investigation, we’ve realized, yet again, who the enemy is. The script is familiar. Thaw in relations, confidence building measures, the where-do-we-go-from-here impasse, the odd crack or two, and then the tragedy. We hurtle through the routine of revelations, denials, allegations, and posturing right up to the edge of a precipice beyond which lies a bottomless pit called war. All it will take now is a shove.

The logical conclusion to the surge in public anger and all of the mounting evidence that hangs like pollution in the air seems only too obvious. There were several enemies being investigated in the immediate aftermath of the Mumbai mayhem, now there is only one. Pakistan. Once again, we have abstracted out all the malevolent forces conspiring to bring us down into a single entity, conveniently located across the border.

The police and army have been anointed heroes. To question that is blasphemy today. I mean no disrespect to the dead among the security forces. If somebody was killed doing his/her job, that’s way more commitment than I can offer to my job. There’s this nagging thing, though. More than 200 Indians were killed, and the psyche of a nation shattered. All of this was done with relative ease, and yet, only the heroes have been accounted for.

So who can you blame? The police and army lacked equipment and sophistication. The various agencies set up for averting such storms before they hit the shore have all claimed prior knowledge, and in the same breath, blamed another agency for not taking them seriously. By swapping the blame around, they have, naturally, absolved themselves of all guilt. The same agencies, including the police, in recent memory, seemed cocksure about their capability to handle any attack when interviewed before the event occurred. In the aftermath, all we get is reasons why they failed. As one American president put it, ” Success has many fathers, failure is a bastard.”

The focus of the first Lok Sabha session after 26/11 was, you guessed it, Pakistan. There was some discussion on the role that government negligence played in the events that transpired on that fateful night, but not enough to provoke some serious introspection within the public domain. Subsequently, the issue has been increasingly sidelined by the noisy diplomatic intercourse between India and Pakistan.

Last week, a swimmer attempted to swim a stretch of the Arabian sea off the coast of Mumbai, trying to pay his respects to the terror victims in the only way he knew. Vinod Ghadge died in his attempt, entangled in a fishing net, that was lying unmarked in his path. Somebody neglected to mark out the fishing net with buoys. The organizers neglected to survey the stretch prior to the swim. It is hard to escape the irony of the attempted homage being cut short cruelly because of human negligence, the same conspirator that facilitated the entry of the terrorists and guaranteed them safe passage to their final destination. On 26th November 2008, true to form, this conspirator neglected to put up welcome boards for the terrorists. Sadly, it took care of everything else.

Some statistics are in order to put things in perspective. Terrorism killed around 400 people in India last year. When several dire warnings about a breach in an embankment were ignored by authorities, Bihar’s worst flood in a century took place. 1000 people killed, 2.6 million affected. The toll will keep rising until human memory is overwhelmed, and no one can remember the causal chain of events leading to another death or an incomplete life. 95,000 odd fatalities in road accidents last year is another neglected statistic. Our rulers would have us believe that there is no relationship between a flood in Bihar, 95,000 road accidents, Vinod Ghadge’s unfortunate demise, the now-and-then random deaths of people getting impaled by steel rods jutting out of trucks, and the madness of 26/11. What do we, as a people, want to believe?

The truth is that Pakistan is not our biggest enemy. Look around you if you want to know who the enemy is. Look within. The time for standing up to this enemy is disappearing fast. The aftermath of such a tragedy gives us a small window of opportunity; to introspect, to investigate, to harness our anger to build up the courage required to confront our demons. One suspects, though, that like always, this time too, we are too scared.

Any war worth fighting for is always fought against one’s own people, right from the time of the Mahabharat. Both India and Pakistan have always known who the enemy is. But, like immature kids who refuse to find the courage to grow up,  they end up taking on each other. For enough people, such a war is convenient. Somebody else fights, you watch the TV, satisfied that your leaders have acted. Eventually, you remember that you won the war, even if everyone has lost.

The cost of war is too high, and the gains, uncertain at best. If we win, what would you do? Annex the entire territory of Pakistan (which is not a practical possibility because the UN, the US, somebody will intervene)? Pakistan is a house full of people setting their own rooms on fire. We have a few such rooms ourselves, and we’re not doing a good job firefighting in those. Imagine a country whose states comprise only Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and the troubled Northeast states. Do we really think we can or wish to control such a madhouse? Anything less than annexation as a win doesn’t help us in the least, since any terror camps we dismantle will simply come up elsewhere. Let’s not even consider what would happen if we lost.

November 26th doesn’t have to happen again. We need to avoid the expensive solutions that don’t work, and focus on problems that have relatively low cost solutions. Such as negligence of duty on the part of the government, and civic duty on the part of citizens. Solving such problems has plenty of side benefits, like not having to dodge sarias jutting from the back of trucks on your way to work. Big problems are really small problems repeated enough number of times. Solutions to big problems are similar: small solutions repeated many times over.

We need participation in initiatives to make the local, state and central governments take heed of our intolerance to negligence. A showpiece initiative for such a cause can be a Right against Negligence movement, along the lines of the RTI movement. If you could have a 24-hour helpline to take complaints about negligence of duty on the part of public servants, wherein you could SMS or call and log your complaint, and expect a reply in a day or a week, how powerful a tool to ensure accountability that might be? It will take time, but with a critical mass of people supporting such an initiative, it is well within the realm of possibility. The success of such a movement is not a complete solution to the problem of terrorism by any means, but without tackling the problem of negligence, there can be no complete solution.

The alternative is to get carried away with the emotion of the hour, and allow ourselves the self-indulgence of revenge. Eventually, when we do get hit again, what a surprise that would be. Like a man, standing butt naked in a city full of perverts and holding his ass wide open, would get surprised when somebody decided to accept the invitation. Again.