3.1. Weberian Model of Bureaucracy and Related Issues
India inherited Weberian model of bureaucracy from the British. The Weberian bureaucracy constitutes a career with a system of promotion based on seniority, fixed remuneration for officials with a right of pension, organized as hierarchy and adhering to rigid rules.
Weber identified the following characteristics of bureaucracy:
♤ Officers are organised in a clearly defined hierarchy of offices.
♤ Candidates are selected on the basis of technical qualifications.
♤ They are remunerated by fixed salaries in money.
♤ It constitutes a career. There is a system of ‘promotion’ according to seniority or to achievement or both.
♤ The official works entirely separated from ownership of the means of administration and without appropriation of his positions.
♤ Each office has a defined sphere of competence.
♤ The officials are personally free and subject to authority only with respect to their impersonal official obligations.
Experience has shown that old fashioned bureaucracies are unresponsive to people’s need, as they are embroiled in red tape and formalism, love tradition and stand for conservatism and status quo.
Today’s environment, where developments in the field of computers, electronics and avionics have crushed time and space, demand institutions which are extremely flexible and adaptable, so that they are capable of delivering high quality services to the people and meet multiple challenges in a complex globalized world.
Commonwealth countries such as UK, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Singapore have discarded the Weberian model of bureaucracy and embraced a new philosophy known as New Public Management (NPM), with dramatic increase in public service efficiency. The main component of NPM philosophy is devolution of authority, performance contracting and customer focus.
The Indian civil service system is rank-based and does not follow the tenets of the position- based civil services. This has led to the absence of a specialised civil service system in India. The basic philosophy of the Indian civil service system has contributed a lot to this phenomenon, as it puts heavy emphasis on the recruitment of generalists and not specialists. The incumbents of the Indian civil service enjoy very short tenures, usually less than one year. All India Services have been criticized for non-federal character.
Thus main issues associated with civil services in India can be summarized as:
♤ Problems of All India Services
♤ Absence of accountability
♤ Out-dated laws, rules and procedures
♤ High degree of centralization
♤ Poor work culture and Lack of professionalism
♤ Politicization of services and political Interference
♤ Negative power of abuse of authority and Corruption
♤ Generalist civil servants in globalized world
All these issues create a conflict between civil services and democracy in following ways:
• Rigid organization structures and cumbersome procedures.
• Elitist, authoritarian, conservative outlook.
♤ Men in bureaucracy fulfil segmental roles over which they have no control. Consequently, they have little or no opportunity to exercise individual judgment.
♤ The requirement that a bureaucrat should follow the principles of consistency and regularity automatically limits his capacity to adapt to changing circumstances.
♤ The general rules which may take for overall efficiency produce inefficiency and injustice in individual cases.
• Civil services’ difficulty to cope with uncertainty and change is a key limit on its efficiency.
