Article - 84 Week 50 The Ghost Of Honest Mistakes

Article - 84  Week 50  

The Ghost Of Honest Mistakes 

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing" - George Bernard Shaw? 

 Don't we all make mistakes as human beings? Mistake is not a desirable thing to start with. Mistakes are made when we cross the lines of the laid 'rule'. When we cross a line and the consequence makes us better off or congruent with the objective at hand, no questions are asked. However, if the consequence is adverse, you are in for big trouble! And most of the people working in the government are in big trouble. 

There are barely any sharp line in the process, norm or rule of governance. The lines are blurred beyond discern. Any thing you do, you tend to stay on the blurred line. These blurred lines even shift in any unpredictable direction, depending upon how confused the elected leadership is or the philosophical inclination of the cerebrals of  the bureaucrat beginning from the bottom of the hierarchy. One such highly ranked bureaucrat I came across, thinks that any minor typo is a deliberate attempt to cheat the government, while if a fraud is committed with impeccable compliance of the existing rules and exacting documentations, it is unnecessary to pay any heed to this.  The good news is, if you cross the line, most of the time nothing happens. You get away easy and clean. However, sometimes these lines get sticky. No matter how carefully you manage your act, you land up in hell for a minor transgression or flirt with the blurred line. You could be heading  for Tihar jail, for an innocuous enough act or decision that becomes the monster of the future, for really no fault of yours except that you did apply your mind. You consider this your misfortune. The only option to stay completely clear of any trouble, is not to act at all. Coming extremely late or disappearance from the work place is one of the means of staying away from acting. That way you never make a mistake. 

And that is the dumbest thing in our governance system. It's time to be more objective with clear 'do's and clear 'don't's. The lines need to be meaningfully sharp and definitive. The ghosts of honest mistakes do not drop from the sky on our bureaucracy. It's their own making at times. Of course, a confused central leadership is the driver behind this crazy & Transformer like, machine called 'bureaucracy'. Our norms are hazy. Our rules are myriad and are multiplying as I am typing this very thing. It's time for us to pressurize the government from all forums to make our rules razor sharp, simplify them, and keep their numbers manageable, rather than clamoring for more rules to check on bad governance. More rules mean more trouble.

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Rath

Article - 83 Week 49 Penalising Mindset:

Article - 83  Week 49

Penalising Mindset:

"In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organised robbery?" - Saint Augustine

At the drop of a hat, you could be penalised in the corridors of Customs in India. The word 'penalty' stems from a retributive & abusive power system. It's directed at people who cross the line of the rule. However, when no rule is broken this 'Penalty'  should not be imposed. Any 'Penalty' so imposed, without any clear violation on technical, intuitive or textual interpretation of the rules,  stamps a traumatic stigma in addition to the pecuniary difficulty on the people. Such arbitrariness is crudely oppressive.

As an example, if you missed a 'zero' on the third place after the decimal on the BL, the penalty imposed could be to the order of Rs 20,000/ or even higher. The Officer could insist that the typing should have been 3.840 Metric Tons, in place of 3.84 Metric Tons. The "zero'' on the third place has no significance, from any accounting or mathematical perspective. But not from the perspective of our Officer in question. He thought that the Rule was transgressed. And imposed a steep penalty, by quoting a Section that barely relates to the issue at hand. Governance is reduced to whims and moods of the people. Was he arithmetically or morally challenged? The answer to the question would do little to the sad consequence. 

This cranky despot attitude by our Customs Officials is a matter of extremely regressive. The juggernaut of discretion and arbitrariness seems to pick up steam along with the protests from the public to bring it down. It is difficult to say, what direction this monster is going to take in the future with a crippled government on shaky morals. The bureaucracy is utterly confused. It refuses to change, while fretting and fearing an uncertain future repercussion. Such arbitrariness is a result of ambiguous rules, suspect intents of the formulators, a great deal of opaqueness, unaccountability of bureaucracy to the people they serve and too much regulations. 

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Brgds

Capt Rath