Bureaucrats under Stress: Administrators and Administration in an Indian State

By Richard P. Taub

A mature and well-organized civil service is one of the items hight on almost any list of the needs of developing countries. The new nations, it is commonly argued, face almost insurmountable obstacles on the path toward economic development, and a civil service is a crucial necessity if they are to overcome their difficulties. Yet many commentators are critical of the existing civil services in these countries. Bureaucracy in developing countries, the critics suggest, is synonymous with red tape, nepotism, and corruption. Such critics complain either that the services have declined in efficiency since the departure of the colonial rulers or, conversely, that civil servants are still excessively wedded to obsolete colonial traditions. Remarkably few of these reports are based on careful empirical analysis of works at their work, or on systematic investigation of workers' attitudes toward it. Taub, who spent sixteen months in the capital of an Indian state studying the Indian Administrative Service, reprots here on his interviews with administrators, as well as with the politicians, technicians, and educators with whom administrators have to work. He examines both the attitudes that men bring to their jobs and to one another an the nature of the tasks that they must perform. His findings suggest that officials behave as they do because of the nature of the situation in which they must function--reflecting the bureaucratic systems and the tasks that they are required to perform--rather than because of any defect in their training or deficiencies in their cultural background. Taub identifies four sources of strain that affect administrators in India: the changing nature of their work, the democratization of government, the limitations on their income, and the impact of the British legacy. He indicates how these strains interact and place severe limits on the potential performance of administrators. IN an appraisal of the analytic framework used in previous discussions of bureaucracy in developing nations, he suggests that the prevailing commitment to democratic socialism--that is, to a democratic government responsible for large-scale economic development--may be more an act of faith than a statement of empirical possibility. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520311916

Richard P. Taub

Richard P. Taub is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. 

Book preview

BUREAUCRATS

UNDER STRESS

RICHARD P. TAUB

BUREAUCRATS

UNDER STRESS

Administrators and Administration in an Indian State

1969

Berkeley and Los Angeles

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

Cambridge University Press

London, England

Copyright © 1969, by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-58080

Printed in the United States of America

To Doris

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research for this study was conducted in Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India from September, 1962 until January, 1964 under a grant from the American Institute of Indian Studies. The Institute generously extended my grant for more than three months beyond its original term when it became apparent that I could not finish the job within the time allotted.

It would be impossible for me to thank Professor Cora DuBois adequately for her contribution to this document. She originally encouraged me to carry out my research in Bhubaneswar, where she was conducting a long-term study titled Confrontation of Modern Values and Traditional Values in a Changing Indian Town, and she placed her extensive resources at my disposal. These included research notes gathered in an ethnographic survey of the city in 1961-1962, introductions to many people in Bhubaneswar, and splendid advice at every stage of the study.

The original research on which this book is based was carried out for my doctoral dissertation at Harvard University, under the direction of Professor Alex Inkeles. Professor Inkeles was the very model of a modern thesis adviser, providing incisive criticism and supervision without harassment. In addition, I am very grateful to Professors Stephen Berger, Carolyn Elliott, Warren Ilchman, David McClelland and David Potter, all of whom took the time to make extensive and detailed suggestions on an earlier draft of the manuscript. My thanks go as well to Mrs. Janet Eckstein, who provided helpful editorial advice.

My warmest thanks go to the many people in Bhubaneswar who welcomed my wife and me into their community. Unfortunately, I cannot list their names, for to do so would violate their wish for anonymity. But such a list would more than fill a page. Without their cooperation, of course, this project could not have been undertaken. But, more important, it was their viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

helpfulness and their friendship that made our stay in Bhubaneswar much more than just field research.

Brown University has demonstrated its support for this effort in a meaningful and concrete way: through summer research grants which gave me time to do the writing, and through financial assistance in the preparation of the manuscript. The manuscript itself was typed under most difficult conditions by Miss Aurora Sequeira.

Finally, special thanks go to my wife, Doris, who not only did all those things wives usually do in acknowledgments, but who was also a full participant through every stage of the research, and an exacting and creative critic.

Naturally, the responsibility for the final product is mine.

FOREWORD

My admiration for Mr. Taub’s book is wide ranging. In it he has combined the problems and interests of a sociologist with the sensitivities to cultural factors and to human situations that I like to believe represent the best tradition in anthropology. His interviews were skillful, sympathetic, and evocative. His discretion, so necessary in the delicate material he presents, is impeccable. He shares with all of us who have been associated with the larger Harvard-Bhubaneswar project a serious interest and deep concern, not only for theory but, more importantly, for India and, more specifically, for the State of Orissa. I shall not attempt to describe the situational context of Mr. Taub’s concerns. He states them for himself in Chapter III.

Among the varied virtues of Mr. Taub’s book is that he has written it in lucid and forceful English. There is no touch of the pedantic jargon that so often serves only to disguise banalities. His readers should be grateful that his undergraduate major was in English literature at the University of Michigan.

In Chapter IX Mr. Taub portrays clearly and succinctly the essential readjustments faced by India’s premier corps of civil servants. In that chapter and elsewhere in this volume, his conclusions are based on a far wider range of information than he, in the interest of readability, has chosen to document. I know this to be the case because I have had the privilege of reading the raw material that Mr. Taub has deposited so conscientiously in the master files of the Harvard-Bhubaneswar project.

His critique, also in Chapter IX, of the widely accepted Weberian model of bureaucracy is a trenchant challenge to that time-and-culture bound formulation. Here is the theoretic heart of his book.

Furthermore, I am grateful to Mr. Taub for producing the first of some eight or nine studies that I hope will be published by the six American and three Indian associates who have been most closely involved in the Harvard-Bhubaneswar study of ix socio-valuational aspects of change. That he has found time and energy to revise drastically the thesis, which he completed in 1966 at Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, while carrying the burdens of his first teaching appointment at Brown University is evidence both of his enthusiasm and diligence. At Brown he has been teaching political sociology and complex organizations. Meanwhile his interest in India remains undiminished. He and Mrs. Taub are studying Bengali with the hope of returning to India in the near future.

A foreword to Mr. Taub’s study is not the place to describe in detail either the intent or the contributions of other participants in the wider project. However, a few words of explanation and some acknowledgments beyond those immediately relevant to this volume may be appropriate. The larger enterprise was launched in 1961-62 on a three-year grant afforded me by the National Science Foundation and renewed through 1969. The grant provided funds for our Indian associates and my own expenses. The six Americans who participated in the project sought their own funds from other institutions. Among them the American Institute of Indian Studies was the most consistently generous. It supported successively Mr. Taub’s work presented here, David Miller’s inquiry into monastic orders in Bhubaneswar, Peter Grenell’s research on town planning and decision making, and Alan Sable’s survey of educational facilities.

However, the central obligation is to the National Science Foundation, without whose grants our Indian associates, the centralizing files in Cambridge, and my own work could not have been effected.

Perhaps even more important, as Mr. Taub indicates in his acknowledgments, is the support and confidence of Indian officials, at both the Central and State levels; their insights, dispassion, and good will have been crucial not only to Mr. Taub’s work but to the projects all of us undertook.

It is a pleasure in this foreword to recall more friends than are named, and to congratulate Mr. Taub on his accomplishments.

CORA DUBOIS

Zemurray Professor March, 1968

Departments of Anthropology and Social Relations

Harvard University

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

Chapter I Introduction

Chapter II II The Indian Civil Service: A Historical Review

Chapter III The Study

Chapter IV The Indian Administrative Service: The Structure of the Organization

Chapter V The Officers: Who They Are and Why They Joined

Chapter VI Sources of Strain: The Changing Nature of the Job

Chapter VII Sources of Strain: The Democratization of Government

Chapter VIII Sources of Strain: The Impact of Democratization on Income

Chapter IX Sources of Strain: The Impact of the British Legacy

Chapter X The Contemporary Milieu

Chapter XI The IAS: An Overview

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

Appendix D

Appendix E

Appendix G

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Chapter I

Introduction

A mature and well-organized civil service is one of the items high on almost any list of the needs of developing countries. The new nations, it is commonly suggested, face almost insurmountable obstacles on the path toward economic development, and, at the very minimum, some national system of coordination is required to help them move along that path. In many of these nations, analysts continue, the entrepreneurial spirit is weak and, in addition, private capital is scarce; if these countries are to become modern industrial nations, the government, through its civil service, must play a large role indeed. 1 Yet, many of these same commentators are disappointed in those very civil services which have shown signs of maturity. Many critics report that bureaucracy in developing nations is synonymous with red tape, nepotism, and corruption. Foreign travelers and other observers recount harrowing, if slightly amusing, tales of infuriating encounters with bureaucrats who frequently either stick to the letter of the law, consequently violating the spirit, or are unable to make decisions. 2

Confronted by these failures of bureaucratic performance, critics distribute blame widely and generously. Edward Shils has suggested that they [the civil services] have had to recruit at a dizzying rate without always being able to maintain a high standard—partly because they have not had available to them a reservoir of very high-grade persons, and partly because com munal and parochial considerations have been allowed to intrude into the process of selection. 3

Other commentators have complained that the leaders are wedded to the obsolete traditions of the colonial rulers who trained them; still others object that leaders have broken too radically with the past, jettisoning many valuable traditions.4

But strikingly enough, most of these evaluations do not rest on careful study of the civil servants themselves: their attitudes toward their lives and their work, the structure of their organizations, and the nature of their work. Rather, they are based on casual observation, informal chats with selected groups, analysis of rules and regulations, or random gossip. There have been, it is true, some provocative analyses of the relationship between bureaucrats and politicians. But of systematic study of bureaucrats in their work setting there has been strikingly little.5

In addition, what there is of this work has suffered because of the implicit frames of reference within which it has been conducted. Underlying most discussions are implied comparisons with the idealized conception of governmental bureaucracy outlined by Max Weber.6 But no bureaucracy, in fact, does function with the efficiency implied in Weber’s ideal type, and, consequently, all will be found wanting in this regard. Beyond this comparison, there seems to be a commitment to what might loosely be called democratic socialism.7 Too few American scholars have asked, however, whether democratically organized nations which rely heavily on their bureaucracies for development can possibly achieve their goals.

This report represents a particular attempt to fill in some of the missing data, and a general attempt to place the problem in a new perspective. It is based on a study of a group of civil servants in the small Indian capital city of Bhubaneswar in the state of Orissa. Most of these men are members of one of the developing world’s most famous and thoroughly established civil services, the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). They represent an intellectual elite which joined the Service by passing a legendarily stringent competitive examination. As members of the Service, they must administer the plans and programs formulated in New Delhi, the nation’s capital, several thousand miles away; coordinate these with the plans and programs of local political leaders; and implement them in the more provincial, isolated districts within their state.

These men stand, then, midway between the cosmopolitan capital city of India and local districts as poor as any in the developing world. Their Service has high standards of performance and probity, and traditions which are old and well established. For the IAS is a descendant of the famous Indian Civil Service (ics), the prototype not only of other colonial civil services, but of much in the English Civil Service as well.

The transition from ics to IAS was not simply a change in the middle initial. Although the changeover has not been accompanied by the decline in quality Shils has suggested, the context of operation and the problems to be dealt with have become quite different. No longer are officials the representatives of a colonial power; they are, instead, servants of the people in a nation committed to democratic politics, a nation whose citizens are increasingly learning to use their relatively new-found power. Further, they are charged with converting India from one of the poorest nations in the world into an economically developed one, a responsibility of depth and breadth of scope so qualitatively different from that of the old ics that one-to-one comparisons are impossible.

We have here, then, a group of men who are members of a well-organized civil service, working in a democratic framework, trying to engineer profound economic and social improvements for their country. In the report which follows, I shall use this group as a case study in an attempt to answer certain questions about civil services in developing countries.

As a case study, this report raises certain familiar methodo logical questions. Most notably, I have made the decision to sacrifice extensiveness for intensiveness and depth, because I believe that the most pressing need in the contemporary study of development administration is for detailed data on as many different areas as possible. Once a base of empirical materials has been established, it may be more feasible than it is at present to make broad generalizations concerning development processes. The second question raised by this approach concerns the generality of the findings. Just how representative are they of India and of the developing world?

The civil servants under study are part of a national civil service whose men are allotted to particular states. Analysis of the composition of the Service from state to state shows Orissa to be comparable in terms of staffing patterns. Interviews with trainees, visits with officials from other states, and analysis of published materials all tend to support the view that the problems faced by officials in Orissa are similar to the problems administrators face throughout the country. I would not, and could not, claim that the Orissa cadre of the Indian Administrative Service is in any way representative of administrative bureaucracies in other developing countries. At the very least, however, intensive study of this particular group may raise general questions that will be applicable to other countries in similar situations.

Having discussed some preliminary considerations, I should now like to turn to the Indian Civil Service and briefly explore its history. From there, I shall move to a description of my study and its findings. And finally, I shall place my findings in a more general context.

1 See, for example, Edward Shils, Political Development in the New States (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1965), p. 43; and Lucian W. Pye, Politics, Personality, and Nation Building (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962).

2 Shils, loc. cit., and Peter Schmid, India: Mirage and Reality (London: Clarke, Irwin, 1961), are but two examples.

3 Shils, loc. cit.

4 For the first view, see Pye, op. cit. For the second, see Ralph Brai- banti and Joseph Spengler, Administration and Economic Development in India (Durham: Duke University Press, 1963), pp. 3-69.

5 For example, Morroe Berger studied Egyptian bureaucrats in his Bureaucracy and Society in Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), but he failed to place these men adequately in their work context.

6 Weber, Max, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans, by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1947), pp. 328-341.

7 Shils, op. cit., and Pye, op. cit.

Chapter II II

The Indian Civil Service: A Historical Review

To comprehend the nature of the IAS, and gain a feeling for the aspirations of its members, it is useful first to look at the ics, its predecessor and model. Details of the history of the ics are buried in the standard reports of the period, such as the Cambridge History of India,¹ but excellent scholarly studies of the early period have begun to appear in recent years.² However, the public image of the Service has been shaped by three of its official historians. L. S. S. O’Malley,³ E. A. H. Blunt,⁴ and Philip Woodruff⁵ are all articulate retired members of the Service for whom that service was something special and fine. They give us a kind of subjective history as they try to recreate the spirit that animated its agents as the Service grew and developed. I rely on their reports not because they are necessarily good historians of the subject, but more because they attempt to convey a feeling about the Service, almost a reverence, that is widely felt in India and in England, even—or perhaps especially —today.⁶ Moreover, it is against this somewhat romanticized picture of a previous age that contemporary officers measure themselves and wonder if they are wanting.

ORIGINS OF THE SERVICE IN THE EAST INDIA COMPANY

The ics was for more than two hundred years quite unlike the organization of faceless bureaucrats usually associated with civil services; it was the Steel Frame of Empire, its members were the men who ruled India, the stuff of which many myths are made. No single date can be given for the founding of the Indian Civil Service. As it has been said of the Indian segment of the Empire, it could be said as well of the ics that it was created in a fit of absentmindedness. By and large, it began on the pattern established by the administrative system of the Moghul rulers, whom the British replaced in India.

In the early days of the British East India Company, clerks, called civilians to distinguish them from the military arm of the Company, came to India to seek their fortunes, and as the Company expanded and prospered, those who survived often succeeded as well.7 They were paid poorly, but they were not expected to live on their salaries. Rather, they augmented their incomes by private initiative. Their methods included private trade dealings, maintenance of monopoly control of new products, collection of graft on taxes, and receipt of gifts from those with whom they did business.

But as the Company grew and its members’ responsibilities increased, their own interests frequently ran counter to the interests of the Company. In some cases, exactions on the local population led to war, as well as to serious financial deficits for the Company. One massacre of Company servants in Patna in 1763 brought Bengal to the verge of ruin. 8 After this catastrophe, attempts were made to place limits on the rapacity of the Company’s servants, so that by serving the Company well they would also serve themselves.

Three men—Robert Clive, Warren Hastings, and Lord Cornwallis, all of whom were governors of the Company in the last half of the eighteenth century—are associated with attempts to place the Company’s representatives on a more solid footing.⁹ In fact, their reforms were so extensive and so thorough that the service they created maintained its essential structural character until about 1930. Many of its features can still be found today.

Their efforts were the efforts of a central administration to control its representatives in the field. Since the agents were, at first, widely and thinly scattered over a country in which communications were poor, it was difficult to maintain discipline. Thus in 1765, during his second term as governor, Clive closed many of the far-flung regional trading posts, and brought his civilians back to the Calcutta and Madras bases of the Company.

In 1773, the right of private trading for civil servants was abolished. At the same time, officers were no longer permitted to receive gifts from the natives. To this day, the Indian Administrative Service Rules set a ceiling on the size of permissible gifts. It was also under Clive in 1766 that salaries were first raised. Clive, and subsequently Hastings and Cornwallis, argued that legislation outlawing potentially corrupt practices was, by itself, pointless. Salaries had to be increased to place young men above temptation. With parsimonious directors in London resisting every increase, the fight to raise salaries was long, difficult, and uneven, but ultimately successful. The high salary that insures a high standard of living has been a feature of government service in India ever since. The IAS began with similar arrangements, although these have been corroded somewhat with time and inflation.¹⁰

The reforms bore fruit. Almost immediately, there were numerous resignations from those who were disgusted because their opportunities to get rich were quickly reduced. By 1840, one commentator in England, impressed by what he saw, announced, There are far fewer sinecures in Bengal than there were in England; and no salary was paid for which some equivalent of work was not exacted.¹¹

Another important step in the early years of the Service, designed both to improve the competence of the civilians and to build a wall against corruption, was Lord Wellesley’s creation, in 1800, of a special training school at Fort William, Calcutta.¹² Practically abolished in 1835 by the Company’s directors, it was later replaced, in England, with Haileybury College, founded to train and ultimately to help select the civilians. Haileybury created traditions and spirit, imbuing its graduates with ideals of honesty and performance. In addition, it created a group of old grads bound to each other and to the Service. The National Academy of Administration at Mussoorie fulfills a similar function today.

THE LOCAL ADMINISTRATOR UNDER BRITISH RULE

Local administration under British rule was built around the position of the collector. Based on a system developed by the Moghul rulers, the post was created to give the civilians more power in overseeing the Empire. The English first utilized it in 1769. Abolished in 1773, it was finally reinstituted in 1781. By 1790, it had developed the essential form it was to maintain until the 1930s. Because of the nature of its responsibilities, the position was central to the structure of the ics, and a contributor to the status of the ics in India. It was to become the keystone of British rule and, perhaps more importantly, the symbol to the people both in India and in England of that rule.¹³

The title itself came from one of the civilian’s early responsibilities, the collection of land revenue. In the course of time, however, various