Who's working for Vizag?

Who’s working for Vizag?

TOI dated 12 September 2016

In the olden days when a shopkeeper who singly looking after his shop, wanted to go out for a bite he generally put out a board reading “CLOSED FOR LUNCH”. Old timers will remember waiting at the doctor’s clinic where a small board read “DOCTOR IS OUT, WILL RETURN AT …” Underneath was a dummy clock, the hands of which could be rotated, that gave the time when the doctor was expected back. Until then we just sat in the waiting room thumbing through old editions of the Illustrated Weekly. Lately we Vizagites are beginning to get a funny feeling that we are constantly in waiting. We are beginning to wonder if there is anyone really looking after our city.

Meeting cancelled

Officials in Vizag are all busy doing something else. Here is how it works. The head honcho in Hyderabad calls for a meeting. He asks the boss administrator in the state to get him some information. The boss in turn asks the principal secretary to get the details, the principal secretary asks his secretary to make some calls, she calls the top man in the district, he asks the top man in the specific government department to get the information pronto, the department man asks his junior official, he in turn asks his peon, who incidentally hasn’t been paid a salary in 3 months and is on temporary service through a contractor for the last five years, to get the information. The entire chain of command goes into information gathering mode. No real work is possible in this mode. Eventually, like a salmon swimming upstream to lay eggs, the cooked up data heads back up to the original person who asked for it. By then it’s too late … the meeting has been cancelled!

BRIC wall

Quite frequently one important man or the other from Hyderabad comes down to Vizag. For weeks before his arrival the local administration goes into selective paralysis. They cannot do their important developmental work, everyone starts working on long PowerPoint presentations. Presentations with thousands of bits of information crammed into every slide. Eventually the VIP visitors have two minutes to hear a dull 20 minute presentation. Someone described these meetings as a large horned Indian bison, a point here a point there and lots of bull in between! Now we are told that the BRICs conference is coming to Vizag. The focus of the city administration is on BRIC, citizens take a back seat. For months before and weeks after, the Vizag citizen needs will be ignored. The standard response from administration for every citizen request will be “let us take it up after BRICs”. It is like walking into a BRIC wall.

Who is the government working for?

If we asked government employees as to who their “customer” is they would look at us like we are crazy. They employee would probably react saying “we don’t have customers, we are the government!” The concept of the eventual customer being the people who his or her department serves has not yet permeated our average government employees mind. The superiors in government encourage subservience and encourage the “sir-sir-sir” behaviour. If you want to be in your senior’s good books you must practice saying “sir…sir…sir” fifty times every morning in front of the mirror. To add insult to injury even the citizens have been conditioned to be subservient to every official cog in the government machinery. So if every official is busy satisfying their superior who is working for the citizen?

Want it by 3 pm today!

To be fair we must point out that when it comes to a crisis the government does swing into action. For example the administration gave a good account of itself when handling the aftermath of hudhud. Most of our officials are all quite competent. However when it comes to routine citizen-centric work, Vizag has been found lacking. In recent times Vizag’s citizens are getting a raw deal. This can be attributed to superiors in administration, most of them in Hyderabad, not allowing the front-line officials in Vizag enough time to perform their duties uninterrupted. In private, officials complain of the extraordinary demands made on them from their higher ups. There could be a call at 10 am asking for the complex information being required by 3 pm. The local officer has to put everything on hold to fulfil his boss’s request. When the government works in such an ad hoc fashion it is an indication that there has been no proper planning leading to inefficient management.

Meetings are becoming unproductive

Meetings take up too much time and disrupt normal work. We must remember that we now have mobile phones so we can essentially ask and answer questions from anywhere. Typically only 2 out of 10 people are vocal at meetings and eventually only one person takes a decision. Consequently many man-hours are wasted by the others who are forced to sit through the meeting glancing furtively at their mobile phones and texting away furiously. The high tech video-conference is also a time waster. Someone could do good business producing realistic dummies that can be seated in the back of the conference room to representing passive participants. Meetings are generally held to spread the decision making process or arrive at a consensus. This is also known as the “spread the blame” method. Incidentally this consensus business is over rated. Our senior administrators are all intelligent and competent. They don’t need ten people to tell them what to do; especially ten subordinates who voice exactly what they expect him to hear. Our administrators can gather inputs over a few phone calls and emails and take informed decisions themselves only if they are given some quality time to work.

No-meetings month

At one time it was fashionable to attend meetings. It sounded important to say “I am in a meeting”. Somehow now day’s traditional meetings are falling out of favour in nimble efficient organisations. Decision makers could just stand in the corridors of an office to exchange information quickly in order to skip a formal meeting. Let us have a NO-OFFICIAL-MEETING-MONTH. If the entire administration decides that they will stop meeting for a month and work hard at resolving all pending public issues we can be sure that there will be a tangible surge in official productivity. In fact the state can save tons of money in airfares, water bottles, cookies, cashews, tea and lost man-hours, not necessarily in that order. We must hope that with fewer demands from Hyderabad and later from Amravati and “meeting holidays” our officials can roll up their sleeves and get back to real work for their customers, the citizens of Vizag. They can then can open their doors, turn that “closed” sign to announce that they are now “OPEN for business”.