An excerpt on streamlining the Indian bureaucracy
The Demand
From the public consensus, it is evident that no one likes dealing with bureaucracy as it presents itself contemporarily. In this day and age of streamlining and efficiency, this is like an ancient relic that was left untouched. We all hear how even months of waiting and standing in lines get you nowhere. Simple changes that are just a couple of clicks and pages away, never get performed, or when they do it’s too late.
This lacklustre system is a reason for a substantial brain drain. The economic and human resource loss is adverse for our growth as a country.
We often come across headlines like these :
The pitiful state of our bureaucracy is something detrimental to our growth as a nation. Helping streamline the process would essentially help increase the public trust in the government architecture as well as save the country millions that are lost due to inefficiency.
Main Idea
Solving this bureaucratic dilemma is not a one-day process and involves working towards a mindset change in the employees. According to reputed studies, one of the best methods for inducing a behavioural change is ‘positive reinforcement’.
One way to do this is to provide rewards and benefits to diligent employees and discourage unproductive work ethics via monetary fines.
The proposition
We plan to enrol a centralised database for all the government-controlled offices. The database will contain the following data for a particular employee:
{1 : Nameoftheemployee, 2 : EmployeeID, 3 : Dept.Employed,
4 : Locationofemployment, 5 : ReliabilityIndex}
The public appraisal will be guided with the help of an app that feeds the input in the aforementioned database. The appraisal will effectively be an employee’s ReliabilityIndex. The ReliabilityIndex in turn governs if a particular employee gets benefits(can be a bonus, some extra vacations, or the like) or they suffer monetary punishments and demotions.
Making the public appraisal fair
As we learned from the Stanford prison experiment :
All power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Keeping the ReliabilityIndex from being polluted is a painstaking task for us. The dilution may arise in many scenarios, some, are listed below :
Revengeful manipulation of the index against an employee even though they are doing a decent job.
Manipulation in the index by an employee, paying up people to rate them higher.
There are some steps that we can take to prevent this. It all lies in how we generate the appraisals and the index.
The following steps can be proposed to make this a fair and efficient process :
- Creating another linked database with the following details :
{1 : NameoftheCitizen, 2 : ID}
This database will essentially contain all the officially recognised citizens of a country.
2. Registration of a unique citizen on the ranking app, based on their official ID. This would limit fake and bot accounts from registering and manipulating the index.
3. Geo-tagging each of the government offices and geo-linking each visit of a unique person to that office, as their eligibility criteria for participation in the ranking process. This can also be done by giving out Q.R code based feedback forms, provided after each visit to the office and limiting the use of one form per-visit-per-person.
Understanding the ReliabilityIndex
Each employee starts at 10 points. The index gets modified every quarter based on the public appraisal. The ReliabilityIndex will be evaluated for every quarter and the employees will be given a whole fiscal year to improve their performance. If it improves they’ll be awarded bonuses, if it’s consistently great the bonus will be exquisite. Meanwhile, the defaulters will face some penalties. This will encourage the hard-workers to deliver every time. The slackers on the flip side will face monetary losses which we know no one desires.
Execution
Making and maintaining a large database would be personnel intensive. Keeping the private data safe and the initial collection of data is a job full of labour. We’ll need people equipped with database management, data security skills, and software developers who’ll make sure that the app and database keep working without a hitch. Hardware requirements include a large server, powerful enough to handle the data of a large population such as ours, the network connectivity, and electricity to maintain that server and storage location for the server.
The Cons
Everything is like a coin, there’ll always be shade against the light. Our database has some issues of its own such as :
The concerns related to the safety of a user’s personal information.
Preventing the mass execution of this idea, and it being converted to a real social ranking system like that of the People’s Republic of China.
The cost of something like this will be humongous.
Performance stress can also lead to mental health issues, as fulfilling demands can be demanding.
How to counter the cons?
User’s personal information can be kept safe with an end to end encryption. Regular audits can be conducted to keep the system running and avoid any compromise with the security. Using a vulnerability and compliance management (VCM) tool or at the very least a vulnerability assessment will help us identify the gaps in our current framework.
The integrity and morale of this system can be maintained via the help of our legal framework and keeping the government accountable through the various rights available to use by the constitution.
The cost concerns look serious at first, but as a loss leader system, this venture will be beneficial in the long run as it’ll help reduce the brain drain and the monetary loss the government faces due to the lack of a proper structure and irregularities in the workforce.
The Money Demands
More financial and statistical research needs to be done before we can estimate the exact cost of running this venture. Though in a rough estimate it can be estimated around a few million rupees. The maintenance cost will be of a similar order.
The Timeline
How will we feed ourselves?
“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Our initial funding will come from the government as this is an initiative aimed at fixing the jittery bureaucracy. In later we may, if permitted by the law and the government, open our doors to school administrations and offices.
Closure
Fixing the bureaucracy is no piece of cake and what is proposed here maybe not be the optimum solution present to us, but a step taken with the right aim is still a step towards progress.
Supportive websites
That helped in making the above-referenced infographics.
Fig -1 https://app.diagrams.net/
