http://www,bagchiblog.blogspot.com
 |
| IIPA, New Delhi |
The
shift from Nagpur took me to the Indian Institute of Public Administration
(IIPA)in Delhi for a nine-month course in Public Administration. The course was
called Advanced Professional Programme in Public Administration (APPPA). It was
a prestigious programme run by a prestigious Institute.
Patterned
on Royal Institute of Public Administration (RIPA) IIPA runs management courses
for public sector managers, government servants, foreign nominees and so on.
Its core intent was defined as “de-colonialising of the mindset
ofadministration and making it more people oriented”. As a sequel, its
responsibility is to enhance the frontiers of knowledge in public policy and
governance through applied research and education as well as training of administrators
to serve the people of India. Enhancing leadership and managerial qualities on
the one hand and developing service orientation on the other are the thrust
areas of the Institute.
APPPA
was a course developed for middle level management of Government of India and
of certain neighbouring countries. Its main components were classroom lectures,
a village study culminating with a dissertation and a tour of someneighbouring
countries for familiarization with their patterns of administration and
administrative practices.
We
were around thirty participants in the course from different organized services
of the government of India, two Bangladeshis and a Malaysian. Among the Indian
participants there was one other Service mate senior to me and a few batch mates
whom I met after a gap of almost twenty years. Though the course meant for
middle level officers i.e. deputy secretaries level, there was one participant
who used to be Additional Secretary level and another who was a Joint
Secretary. There was even a chief engineer of the Central Public Works
Department. I later came to know that the Course had degenerated into a ploy
for those who wanted to remain in Delhi after completion of their tenure
regardless of whether they fulfilled the criteria for being inducted for the
Course or not. It seems, there used to be pushes, pulls and manipulations to
have oneself included in the Course – quite a sordid affair. It is better not
to think or speak about it.
I
got introduced to the subject of Sociology during this course and I found it
immensely interesting. I read up some books and among them was one of MN
Srinivas who, I found, was very interesting. Other lectures were routine and
not very enlightening as most of us who had qualified in Humanities were aware
of them. I recall one very interesting lecture by the representative of
Singapore Government who spoke about the differences with Malaysia because of
which the port of Singapore became a City State. The separation proved to be for
the better for Singapore as, todayfor its size, it is economically and
industrially very strong.
For
a village study I was a part of a batch of seven participants who were taken to
Udaipur in Rajasthan and were given different subjects for studies in neighbouting
villages. I was to study the Rural Indebtedness in a village. My probes pointed
towards corruption among the revenue department officials and officials of
banks located in the village or near about. The villagers found it too
inconvenient to obtain loans from banks as at every step they had to shell out
money to bribe either the revenue department officials for certifying the
necessity for a loan or the officials of the banks for approving it. The banks
were opened in rural areas to wean the villagers away from the usurious village
money lenders. But despite the government’s efforts to kill the business of the
village money lenders the villagers found him to be the best bet being a
one-stop facility for obtaining loans. No clearances from the revenue officials
were necessary for which the rural folk had to bribe the officials. Likewise,
they did not have to bribe the bank officials to speedily disburse theloan.
They did not mind the high interest rates of the money lenders. The rural
branches of the banks, therefore, failed to live up to the purpose for which
these were opened. The dissertation on the study fetched me, as they did for
others for their respective dissertations, a degree of M.Phil recognized all
over the country.
Towards
the end of the Course we were taken on a familiarization tour of three
neighbouring countries, viz. Sri Lanka, Malaysiaand Singapore. It was an
interesting tour about which I have written separately. Here it would suffice
if I pointed out the things which struck me to be useful or strange. For
example Sri Lanka was not apparently keen on facilities of training in India or
the expertise available. For training of their officials they would depute
their officers to distant lands. For example, for acquiring expertise in rice
cultivation they would send their officers to Japan when India next door
seemingly had the necessary expertise in the shape of a Rice Research
Institute. Similarly, I found many of their officers were deputed to UK for
training on matters for which expertise was available in India. Either they did
not have faith on Indian establishments or the local Indian mission did not
sell the country’s wares, so to say, hard enough.
In
Malaysia there were two pieces of interesting information that came our way.
One was about monitoring of high value projects at the highest level in order
to prevent time and cost overruns. The other was about road construction. We
had found the roads of Malaysia excellent. The reason was that all the
utilities that rendered their services through underground pipes and cables were
told before a road is constructed that for next twenty years they would not be
allowed to dig up the roads and hence they should do whatever was necessary
within the given time frame. In our country we always find that roads are dug
up soon after they are built by one utility or the other.
When
we visited Singapore in 1981 Singapore was still considered a cheap market.Its
prime minister did not like this tag. He wanted his country to be a market for
high-end goods. Over the years he has been successful in having it done and the
country now boasts of a market that vies with Dubai as one of the world’s best
markets. Even when we visited Singapore it was for us something out of this
world. We, of course, were from a poor pseudo—socialist country and had not
seen many of the mechanical or electronic gadgets that were being sold openly
in its malls. In our country in those days these were not allowed to enter or
had very high rate of duty imposed on them. The visit to Singapore, in this respect, was an eye-opener.
After
nine months for the first time on completion of the training programme I was
posted in the national headquarters in New Delhi which was till then known as
the P&T Board. The next installment will be about that period of a little
more than three years that I spent at this office.
(To be continued)
*Photo of IIPA is from internet
No comments:
Post a Comment