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15 Sep, 2008, 0420 hrs IST,Jaideep Mishra, ET
Bureau
NEW DELHI: A recent working paper at the fabled Harvard Business School is exclusively on the pachyderm called Indian officialdom. The researchers build a modelling framework to study how politicians in power–facing short-term electoral uncertainties–manage bureaucrats with long-term career ambitions. The findings suggest that politicians use frequent reassignments, read transfers, across posts of differing importance as a means of administrative control. Also relevant is the observation that high-skilled bureaucrats, with a knack for getting things done, actually tend to get less frequent transfer orders and, more important, face a lower variability in the importance of their posts. What’s posited is that bureaucratic turnover and political change have implications for governance.
The study also indicates that mandarins of higher initial ability are more likely to build up expertise and domain knowledge in particular fields. What’s seen is that bureaucrats belonging to the same caste as their political masters do garner prized postings. Also, officials are less likely to be transferred outright if the political executives have alternative means of control via politicians lower down in the ruling-party hierarchy. Further, the data show that districts with higher rates of politically influenced bureaucratic transfers “are somewhat less successful” when it comes to poverty reduction, over the long-term.
As the paper notes, several countries, India included, do have in place considerable insulation for the bureaucracy from political pressures, by way of constitutional design. But politicians do need to deal with the problem of motivating
“protected bureaucrats” to perform as they would

like them to. Hence the need to be selective and hand-pick bureaucrats to delegate authority, for myriad tasks. The reasoning is that on the one hand the “politician principal” cares about having control over the actions of bureaucrats. And on the other, the officials themselves care very much about the prestige and importance of the assignments that come their way. The tricks of the trade for those lower down in the bureaucratic ladder is to either develop a reputation for expertise or build a reputation for loyalty to particular politicians. Both methods are seen as
“viable” means of securing prized posts in Indian officialdom.
The study is based on analysis using a unique data set of the career histories of over 4,000 bureaucrat fat-cats belonging to the elite IAS, and encompassing the period between 1980 and 2004.
The research also involved data on political changes in the major states during the period, measures of bureaucratic ability both at initial and later career stages, and gauging the relative importance of different posts as perceived by the mandarins themselves. The paper finds that politicians use frequent transfers across posts to control bureaucrats.
Now the Constitution does stipulate that the IAS bureaucrats ‘hold office during the pleasure of the
President’ and cannot be ‘dismissed or removed by an authority subordinate to that by which he was appointed’ as per Articles 310 and 311. This means that IAS officers cannot be dismissed or demoted by state-level elected representatives.
Note that the ministry of personnel has quite recently begun assigning numerical grades for the work output and completion plans of individual functionaries, for more objective appraisal.
The research paper makes use of specifications, equations and sophisticated research methods to study transfers as an administrative tool. The finding is that IAS bureaucrats are transferred
“extremely frequently.” Over the research period, the probability that an officer gets transferred in a

given year is 49%. Also, the average tenure in a given post is just about 16 months. Additionally, no more than 56% of district officers spend more than one year in their jobs. The norms do require three to five year tenure in each post. It is true that frequent transfers of bureaucrats have been a longstanding tradition in India.
The study mentions of an account from the days of the Raj, of how “between 1879 and 1885, colonel
Tweedie did three stints in Gwalior, two in
Baghdad, two in Ajmer, one in Jodhpur, one on the road between Peshawar and Kabul as political officer during the invasion of Afghanistan, and another as political officer in charge of Jalalabad.”
But the more things change, the more they remain the same! The paper finds that for Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal cadre officers, being of the same caste as that of the party base should make it easier for a bureaucrat to “invest” in terms of political loyalty and patronage.
In tandem, the paper also finds that officers with high initial ability are more likely to be recommended for senior positions in the central government. Besides, a chief minister is
“significantly less likely” to transfer district-level officers in districts where local elected representatives belong to the CM’s political party.
The implication is that instituting limits to
‘political’ transfers can encourage domain expertise rather than plain loyalty to the political executive.
(Travelling Agents: Political Change and
Bureaucratic Turnover in India, Lakshmi Iyer and
Anandi Mani, Harvard Business School working paper, July 2008)
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