The Prime Minister appears genuinely serious about ensuring good governance. He will certainly talk about it tomorrow when he speaks from Red Fort. But, as we all know, mere good intentions are never enough.
Setting governance right requires, above all, the ability to diagnose what the actual problem is, not in the generalised terms that the various committees on administrative reform spell out but in being able to single out the small details that add up to poor governance, and then devising ways of tackling them.
This article focuses on one such detail. If the UPA government can fix it, I believe it will have greatly furthered the cause of good governance in a very practical and meaningful way. The detail I refer to is queues -- yes, something quite as mundane as that.
When you think about it, you will realise the extent to which bad governance in India is really about queues, or more precisely their absence, or, even more precisely, the absence of proper queuing.
It doesn't matter where or what it is -- at the courts, for housing plan approvals, driving licences, electricity connections, passports, whatever. Whether it is people or their files, there is an enormous problem with queuing. But the government simply doesn't seem to know it.
The root of the problem lies, of course, in more than one person wanting the same thing at the same time. Taking turns is the only reasonable and equitable answer, but the manner in which this is done can make all the difference between good and bad governance.
Few realise it, but queues are about fairness, impartiality, non-discretion, and all those sorts of things that prevent resentment.
The problem is especially acute in India because here citizens have to take several permissions from the government for all sorts of things, ranging from the trivial to the important. This is itself the consequence of the failure of post-Independence governments to rectify a major British wrong perpetrated in India.
Thus, while in Britain you can do anything as long it is not prohibited, in India they turned this around: you can't do anything until it is specifically allowed. Hence so many queues in India.
The need for so many permissions may or may not be justified. Most suggestions for administrative reform, however, focus on this aspect.
They conduct an enquiry into Original Causes. But cosmic solutions take cosmic time and, more often than not, are impractical. Deleting the need for one permission needs a decade or more and you eventually find that some other permission has popped up.
So why not strive for the sensible, do-able things, like, say a proper queuing system? Much of the public perception of poor governance has to do not with the need for permissions, which many know are necessary. It has to do with the haphazard system in which the permissions are granted or, what is the same thing, the absence of proper queues.
So here, for what it's worth, is my suggestion and it is a very simple one. Let the Prime Minister instruct every government department to evolve a proper and scientific system of queuing for the citizenry and its files. Fortunately, there is an entire branch of mathematics devoted to queuing, known as the queuing theory. India has enough experts on the subject.
Babudom will rebel because proper queues will wipe out speed money, but it seems worth trying. I have never seen any resentment in a place where the queuing system was fair, even if it was not very quick.
The core of the idea behind the queuing theory lies in the situation that the government faces everyday, namely, limited resources to handle the demands made on it, sometime because of its own foolishness. It also makes economic sense to have queues because otherwise, how windows would you need?
All queuing systems can be broken down into individual sub-systems. For instance, the process of arrival: is it regular or irregular, in batches or continuous? What is the probability distribution of arrivals, and so on. How many government departments have any idea of all this?
Then there is the service mechanism. Assuming there is no mala fide, how many government departments actually know how long it will take for a request to be serviced? A common mistake most government departments make is to assume that service time does not depend upon the arrival process. Another error is to assume that service time is exponentially distributed.
Next comes the problem of choosing whom to serve first. It makes sense to serve the person who will take the least amount of time first. The trick lies in identifying that person. How many government departments bother to do this?
A proper application of the queuing theory would also require the government departments to find out, amongst other things, the average length of the queue, the probability that the queue will exceed a certain length, the expected utilisation of the servers, and the expected time period during which they will be fully occupied, etc. Is there a single government department that has done this?
It is also necessary to ask how many servers are needed, and if different priorities are going to be assigned to different persons and the basis on which this will be done. No government department does any of this and priority is therefore always based on speed money, the proxy for bad governance.
The passport office has the tatkal system but the pricing is faulty -- too low -- so that long queues have formed for that service as well. Now you have to bribe for the tatkal service as well.
The answers to all these questions can be had either from the analytic methods of the queuing theory, but these are for simple queues only (e.g. railway tickets), or from computer simulation for more complex queues that require multiple permissions, or are simply very, very long. Has any government department even tried this?
I know what the response will be: if only it were that simple. True, there are lots of other more glamorous aspects to governance. But at least where public dealings are concerned -- and those are a lot -- it would help to apply modern methods to dealing with people.
A long journey, as the man said, begins with a small step.