The former bureaucrat on memorable civil servants

A service career brings contact with thousands of people, many of them quite remarkable. One's own colleagues are perhaps the most memorable.

Philip Mason

My earliest brush with the British ICS came when Philip Mason and I both helped out in a production of Macbeth in Delhi during World War II -- he as Banquo and I as a humble off-stage producer of thunder and weird sounds for the witch scenes. Off-stage, Mason was full of mischief and whisky. At work, he was a joint secretary in the war department, which he often represented in the central legislature.

During the naval mutiny, it was he who told the assembly that there had not been much of a revolt in HMIS India, as the naval establishment at Delhi was called. The commanding officer had got the ratings to fall in two lines, one of loyal men, the other of rebels. The latter then listed their grievances: shabby uniforms, bad housing, low pay, poor food... That was too much for at least one of the mutineers. He furiously crossed over to the other line. He would have no more truck with the mutiny. He was HMIS India's cook.

Mason is, of course, best remembered for his splendid history of the Indian Civil Service -- The Men who ruled India: The Founders and The Guardians -- which he wrote after his retirement, under the pen name Philip Woodruff. It is easily the best contribution to Indian administrative history, a classic by any standard. Mason later wrote a history of the Indian army, which, I believe, is required reading at the Army Staff College.

A D Gorwala

Then there was A D Gorwala, who set up Bombay's food rationing system during World War II, a system that still operates, though with falling efficiency now.

He quit soon after Independence, after differences with the Bombay government's ministers. He went on to publish, for years thereafter, a periodical newsletter, Opinion, which relentlessly exposed and flayed the government's frequent misdeeds.

I cannot forget his contribution at a lecture in Bombay by Sir Noel Hall, the head of the Administrative Staff College at Henley in the UK, which was the model on which the central government set up the Administrative Staff College of India in Hyderabad. Sir Noel had helped enormously in the establishment of our ASCI, the first management institution in India.

He was now visiting to see how well the new college was faring. In Bombay he tried to explain the relatively new management concepts imparted at Henley and now in Hyderabad. Gorwala chaired the session, at the end of which, in his summing up, he made the usual polite noises, but then added in a patronising note: "We have heard so much about this new-fangled science of management training. In our time we ran the country simply by recruiting intelligent people into the ICS and letting them loose on their own in the districts. The system worked well."

The room was dark. I wasn't able to get a glimpse of Sir Noel's reaction.

S G Barve

By far the most competent and dedicated civil servant I have known was S G Barve, with whom I was privileged to work off and on for some eight years. I saw (and helped) him deliver Poona from the consequences of the Panshet dam disaster.

He had just quit the ICS prematurely, but Chief Minister Y B Chavan put him in charge of operations, and he drove himself and us with his usual zest and skill, weaving his way through the strands of red tape in which his erstwhile colleagues tried to entangle him; they were steeped in the belief that relief had to be slow to be orderly.

He had left the service to join the Congress, disgusted with the constraints and hurdles his colleagues placed in his way. A booklet he wrote on his retirement, On the Threshhold of the Congress, had a precious cover showing a large bird escaping from a cage. Upon which C D Deshmukh wrote to ask whether Barve was not leaving one cage for another.

It was a comment of which I was to remind him a few years later. By then he had won an election and had been Maharashtra's finance minister and industries minister in turn. His experience as a politician had been far less satisfying than he had expected; it had saddened and embittered him. He was now confronted not only by an impervious civil service that had grown in hostility, but also by the wiles of politicians far more adept at their game than he. He was lonelier than ever.

L G Rajwade

Leave the heights of dedication and service for a while to consider population and patriotism and the plight of the East Pakistan refugees who settled in India in the 60s. The central government sent a few thousands of them to Chandrapur district, for resettlement in agriculture. Until their land was ready for tilling, they lived in makeshift camps.

At the Sachivalaya (it had not yet been promoted to Mantralaya), L G Rajwade, ICS, looked after rehabilitation, or professed to. Once a year he would exchange the comforts of the state capital for a week in Chandrapur's forests, ostensibly to supervise refugee relief and rehabilitation. The refugees got about a half hour of that week, the rest of it spent in contemplative retreat at a rest house deep in the jungle. In that half hour he visited one of the camps.

At once appalled by the large number of children that swarmed all over the camp in various stages of undress and malnutrition, he summoned the camp commandant, who then received stern instructions that population growth must be strictly controlled: No More Births. This done, Rajwade returned to the delights of the jungle.

A year later he came again. This year's half hour revealed more kids than ever. Our Banga brothers and sisters may be more prolific than the rest of us; moreover, life in the camps gave them very little to keep them busy. Incensed by what he regarded as an indifference to his earlier instructions, he called for the camp's medical officer. He, the government's rehabilitation secretary, would hold the MO personally responsible for any more births in the camp, he told the doctor. Satisfied with a chorus of 'Yes Sir's from the MO and the other camp officers, the respected secretary retired once more into the jungle, the population problem solved for another year, the camp officials tittering in his wake.

A patriot if ever there was one, LG wore his patriotism on his sleeve, or whatever other part of the garb he happened to don. A brother IAS man, Rusi Boga, told me how, after the police action, Rajwade and he were sent temporarily to Hyderabad to help run the new administration. Came Independence Day, and the ceremonial parade, which officials had to attend in national dress, to line up on the reviewing stand.

LG turned up in grand Maharashtrian style, in robes topped by a pheta, with a sword held to his waist on a sash. Vellodi, the Government of India's chief administrator for Hyderabad, quietly sidled up to him: "Rajwade, this is not a fancy dress ball. Go home and get into a sensible dress". His tone conveyed a sense of urgency, reflected in the speed of LG's withdrawal.

M W Desai

For unorthodox attacks on problems that face an administrator, it is hard to touch the lovable Madhu W Desai, who joined the IAS with me in 1947. From the very start of his career, he combined an inability to say 'no' to any request, however outlandish, a readiness to experiment with truth, and a total contempt for the book of rules, with a heart of gold. As collector of Ahmednagar, he once had to cope with heavy floods that had ravaged a part of the district.

Travelling the area affected to organise relief, he reached a spot where his car could go no further; the flood had submerged the road. The locals told him that a village was marooned on the far side of the flood. With hardly a moment's hesitation the collector stripped. He then swam out through the river to comfort the villagers and organise help.

Earlier, as collector, Banaskantha, he had left headquarters one evening to camp at a remote village some 60 miles away. When he got there, he learned to his dismay that a village woman had been in labour for some considerable time, with no end in sight. At once he got her into his car, drove all the way back to district headquarters and lodged her in the government hospital. After waking up the civil surgeon and instructing him to look after the poor lady, Madhu drove the 60 miles back to his camp.

His unorthodoxy was irrepressible. As industries commissioner, he would hold large official meetings that dragged on endlessly, the tedium sometimes broken by irrelevant diversions. If there happened to be some interesting cricket on, we could all watch the match on a television set in his room, while we dealt as best we could with the pedestrian problems of industry in Maharashtra.

Madhu got the decisions he wanted by some shameless name-dropping. He had always just come from meeting the finance minister, or perhaps the CM, and newcomers to the Desai darbar would hastily fall in line with what he had decided.

P N Damry

Then there was Pervez N Damry, MA of Cambridge, who got into the IAS after a few years in the provincial service, as a deputy collector. He quickly acquired the airs and graces of a pucca true-blue ICS Britisher, and carried them well beyond. At one time he sported a monocle, through which he would regard us lesser fry, to put us in our places. His graces eventually took him into the Reserve Bank, and later into the World Bank. "When [World Bank President] Robert McNamara hired me", he once told me, "he made me promise I would tell him whenever he went wrong. And for eight years I did just that."

Curiously, a new book has just come out on the damage the World Bank has done in developing countries. It says a good deal about McNamara, his advisers and his mistakes, but forgets to name aplo Pervez. It is appropriately titled, though: Masters of Illusion.

Suraj Bahadur

The most outrageous name-dropper in my experience was not in the IAS at all; he was a member of the Indian Management Pool, with the impressive name of Suraj S J Bahadur Jung. Naturally, his signature ran all over any page he signed, completely dominating it. He sprinkled his remarks with familiar references to 'Indu', who couldn't stomach 'Aunty', alias Vijayalakshmi Pandit.

Suddenly one day he popped a question to me: "You were in the Navy, did you know that the Spanish Armada was built in Bombay?" I didn't, of course, but asked how he knew. "Well", he said with pretended shyness, and pausing for effect, "it was Onassis who told me, Aristotle, you know. At a party in New York. JFK and Jackie were there. The Kennedys, you know."

G H Lalvani

Last in this list I come to a college classmate who succeeded me as general manager, BEST, in Bombay in 1969. About half way through what might have been a three-year stint, bored, possibly, by the tedium of bus operation, Govind Lalvani stole off to the UK by air, ostensibly for talks with Leyland Motors. In those days official trips to foreign lands were coveted and rare. Govind's trip amused no one; it aroused special fury in the municipal corporation, which owns the BEST. He had sought no one's sanction; he had left the city in stealth. Pramod Navalkar, then chairman of BEST, was particularly piqued, because he was suddenly left without a chief executive.

The local press went to town over Lalvani's disappearance. Cartoonist Mario Miranda drew the BEST committeemen huddled together in a bus, urging the driver to 'follow that plane'. There was daily speculation about the GM's return, after he was 'seen somewhere in Europe sporting a scarlet tie'. Reporters watched the airport day and night. According to Busybee, he was eventually spotted slinking into India, boarding a taxi at Santa Cruz 'in a yellow check shirt and a broad-broad tie with a floral design'.

High drama followed. The municipality appointed another GM, but Lalvani refused to quit, stationing a guard outside his office room. So for a day or two the BEST had two GMs. Busybee reported that on the bus he boarded there were two conductors, and he had to buy two tickets.

Lalvani was as furious as his councillor bosses. In what Busybee called a Shakespearean turn of phrase, he swore to 'remain at my post of duty, unfurl the battle flags and fight the illegal and unjust actions. I shall move away the curtain now, tear open their masks and show them up to the people as they really are'.

The civil service has always bred a variety of colourful characters, some of them quite devious. A CIDCO director once advertised the sale of new houses at well below the construction cost. Naturally, CIDCO's chairman took him to task. His response: 'But look at the fine print: Walls extra, windows extra, electric fittings extra, etc.'

I hear he now runs correspondence courses for builders. At the other end of the scale, you can encounter extreme naivete. There was a secretary to government who in the course of a discussion suddenly burst out in anger: 'You are taking advantage of weaknesses in my argument.'

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