Bureaucrat- capitalist nexus

A day after the election results, I was sitting with my dad & watching the events unfold on the TV when he remarked: " Why do we need two set of people to do the same thing?" I asked him what he meant & he replied:"Well, there is this national highway development program for example. There is one set of govt employees / bureaucrats who sit in NHAI & similar & decide which roads to develop & so on. Then they dole out these lucrative earning opportunities to (so to say) the lowest bidders (namely the contractors). The contractors then construct these roads. Earlier, in the 60s & 70s, the govt used to build the roads by directly employing labour, thus guaranteeing proper wages to the lowest workers while ensuring quality. Then, as corruption increased, the babus formed a nexus with the material suppliers & supplied sub-standard materials to the roads. As a result the roads were no longer reliable. The govt suddenly decided that it was incapable of building roads & should divest itself of this responsibility. Thus were the road contractors born. Earlier, they provided quality as they had a name to keep & the roads were fine again. But the babus formed another nexus with the contractors & again the quality suffered. Now, we are in the third phase where the government passes on the build-operate-transfer/own rights to contractors & they are free to do what they like. Initially, this worked too, as the contractors owned the roads & collected toll. So they maintained the stretches well. Again, the babus have formed a nexus, and the roads (even expressways) are back to the poor lamentable conditions. The rot has set in, and there is no further hope unless we remove the roots of the rot first!"

I took the opportunity to compare this to Klein's description of events in South American countries during the 1970s. A small problem was magnified hugely by private capital hungry for resources & sources of exponential earning to show that the then current system didn't work. They kept proposing free market policies privatizing all forms of services, and earning enormous profits from the same, while the general condition continued to deteriorate.

In the same manner, as just one example of such a policy, private capital in our country has kept insisting the govt is unable to develop & maintain quality roads by itself, freeing the entire operation from the government step-by-step, ultimately owning the roads, bullying people to pay toll even as the quality of roads deteriorates to earlier (or worse) levels. Put this example to comparison in other policies like power, air transport, water works, urban infrastructure, etc etc & you get the point. The whole aim of the exercise is to keep fooling the public into believing that the govt is incapable of doing things itself & private capital / corporations are the only answer to quality development. As each small step fails, another more radical alternative is presented as a hope. If this continues, we will effectively privatize all our essential services to no end, & lose whatever control we have over our basic rights as citizens.

While I am not a supporter of leftist / socialist policies i do not believe that democracy entails complete corporatocracy. Certain basic services / rights have to be ensured by the government & the best (though less efficient) way of doing it is for the government to control the production & distribution of these services. Private capital is not answerable to the public & in effect creates oligarchy, since essential services are not liable to competition. While grossly inefficient, the government machinery is atleast answerable to the voters & thus (marginally) in their control. 

This raises an important question regarding bureaucracy, which i shall discuss in the next post.

Posted via email from sandylief