Mastering the Nunchaku
Twice winner of the Prime Minister’s Award for Excellence in Public Administration in India, Krishna Bhaskar shares hard-won lessons on what it takes to become an effective practitioner in the civil service—including wisdom from the martial arts.
Of your many contributions to infrastructural development, where do you think you have made the most difference?
I have been involved in two kinds of infrastructure development. The first is as a facilitator of very large state or national projects, such as national highways, bridges, logistics corridors, and some institutions of importance.
The second are more geographically specified projects for which I have had to bring various governmental and non-governmental stakeholders on board, persuading them of the need for these interventions and getting the work commissioned. These are the projects where I believe I have made the most difference.
One example is a large housing colony in my town of Sircilla in Telangana state, with about 1,300 apartments along with playgrounds, parks, community centres, day care centres, and schools. We gave house ownership certificates to deprived families, whom we identified through database analyses as well as open village meetings.
For another project—now a textbook case for training civil servants—we increased water levels by six metres over two years in our district, through large scale afforestation and water regeneration with multiple initiatives: tree planting (in millions), hill trenching, creating new farm ponds, and building local reservoirs, along with a massive programme across 330 habitations to handle solid and liquid waste to prevent pollution.
A third example is how we rapidly set up and staffed immunisation centres in Siddipet district. In a record time of three months, we were able to push the total immunisation rate (11 doses of different vaccines) beyond 100%—including the floating population of migrant labourers.
Your case study “How Many Bottom Lines is One Life Worth?”1 discusses the dilemma of a community trapped in abject poverty. What lessons can you share with government practitioners seeking to help those at the bottom of the economic pyramid?
The Harvard Business Review case discusses how government interventions supported and uplifted a community of handloom weavers impacted by industrial-scale manufacturing in Sircilla. The community had been experiencing profession-related suicides at about 40 times the national average rate. From our interventions, three prominent lessons stand out.
The first lesson is how normal rules of thumb do not scale down to the bottom of the pyramid. In most conventional governmental interventions, effectiveness and efficiency move in unison. However, in some complex cases the lead time needed for policies to sink in can pull these two indicators apart. Ultimately, effectiveness over the long term should be the measure of success, rather than quarterly indicators of spending efficiencies.
Previous attempts to support this community—all well-meaning, meticulous exercises—had each taken different approaches: psychological counselling, technical upgrading and training, and a huge increase in available credit. What we did, against prevailing policy norms, was to combine these approaches and implement the full package in one go. We also added a defined marketplace to provide long-term growth: tying up with the annual Dasara festival, we arranged for the Sircilla weavers to supply nearly 10 million sarees to be distributed across the State, paid for by the government. This created economies of scale and scope. More importantly, it sent a powerful message that the government was willing to do whatever it took, however long it took, to resolve issues. This helped us gain traction with an otherwise sceptical community.
The second lesson is to respect the wisdom of the local community and its natural leaders. Start any intervention with humility.
Any presumption that you “know” what is wrong, before carrying out enough due diligence, will backfire and negate any goodwill generated. A good rule of thumb is to just listen for the first few weeks, while always being on call to handle emergencies. Solutions are usually there in the community, and will reveal themselves in time.
The third lesson is that it usually gets worse before it gets better. Despite precautions, there was pushback in the first few months of the project. Respected members of the community were unconvinced by our efforts and vocal about their doubts. We were only able to get considerable traction later because we took time to engage with all the stakeholders, even though it slowed our project down initially.
In carrying out a policy intervention, it is vital to be clear-headed about long-term plans and resist the temptation to course correct just because there is criticism (unless new facts emerge). Besides, what comes as criticism can serve as a sort of free-form debugging before you run the programme. Learning to harness this to improve policy interventions is a valuable art.
Be clear-headed about long-term plans and resist the temptation to course correct just because there is criticism.
Based on your experience in advancing e-governance, what strategies have you found to work best in narrowing the digital gap, particularly in rural regions?
In my first job in this field, I created a successful multipurpose app for navigating a religious festival Maha Pushkaram, in collaboration with Google Maps. The approach was top-down, based purely on parameters we set.
Subsequent attempts showed my first success to be an exception. Unless you plan to provide a standardised essential service that does not already exist, the best way forward may be to facilitate large-scale digital literacy, make a genuine choice available to users, and then let them lean toward their preferred option. Otherwise, users will go their own way anyway, rather than follow your intended design path.
Make a genuine choice available to users, and then let them lean towards their preferred option. Otherwise, users will go their own way anyway.
Unless there is a clear consensus and an overarching need, keep away from setting and imposing standards. When this is not the case, allow different standards to proliferate and a clear choice to emerge on its own, based on actual user experiences.
Telangana is known nationwide for its strong network of self-help groups comprising low-income, rural women. These groups have probably the lowest debt default rates in the State and beyond: they are already good producers, and know what they need to be even more effective. For instance, one of the parameters they surfaced to us, based on their actual work needs, was for technology that could help them better evaluate employee productivity.
We may find it more effective to let standards, technological choices, training modules, and monitoring mechanisms be as bottom-up as possible, leaving some small room for exceptions.
As you suggest, civil servants often have to work with stakeholders outside government, including the private sector, in order to realise policy objectives. What practical strategies have you found most effective in these collaborations?
I have worked with remarkable colleagues in the private sector and have learnt a lot from them. There is no fundamental difference between the two domains. However, I try to brief my counterparts about the different contexts before any engagement.
First, government decisions are not necessarily taken with a single end goal in mind: they are often collectively taken to reduce the risk of litigation later. The challenge is to find common ground between the government instinct to play it safe and the entrepreneurial instinct to push ahead. Once we establish common ground, it is easier to find a path of least resistance forward.
Second, the gestation period for many government initiatives is very long. There is often a change of guard by the time any project is completed, which may cause hiccups towards the end of a project. It is useful to plan with this in mind right from the start.
Third, the basic process of decision-making does differ in private and government organisations. A market-oriented organisation can, if necessary, crack the whip on any decision made, and the decision will be seamlessly and clearly transmitted through the ranks. In government, however, instructions are wielded more like the nunchaku. There are multiple centres of mass as the instruction passes through the ranks, and each may alter the message as it passes through. This is a feature, not a bug, of the government system, which must ensure different aspects of a decision are legitimate, legal, and publicly accountable. This dynamic has to be accounted for in planning. And as martial arts practitioners know, it takes years, if not decades, to learn to wield the nunchaku well.
You are a member of the Indian Administrative Service, an elite cadre of professional civil servants. How might a country’s public sector develop an esprit de corps and common purpose among its public servants in order to address national needs?
An elite cadre of civil servants faces two challenges: that they might drift apart without a shared set of values, or they might become too homogenous to think independently or dissent when the situation calls for it.
Today, civil servants who enter service at the same time train together for a combined period of two years. This affords a measure of common purpose and camaraderie among the cohort. The general emphasis on esprit de corps has also increased in recent years.
The opposite problem is less frequently discussed. Given that a civil service is expected to deliver on a political mandate, cohesion is relatively easy to create. It is significantly more difficult for any organisation to encourage divergent opinions, especially if it involves working with counterfactuals that can disrupt, if ever so slightly, the status quo. For instance, a civil servant may be criticised for proposing an inconvenient and expensive system that might in fact prevent a disaster.
If a system were to consider counterfactuals and reward those who strengthen the system by thinking differently, it may have to encourage the opposite of camaraderie, in a thoughtful and mature manner. This is a challenging mindset shift because the civil service is expected to prioritise legitimate and speedy delivery of the government agenda.
In your view, what is the appropriate working relationship between civil servants and the political leadership? What advice might you give a younger officer learning to approach this relationship productively?
Constitutionally speaking, the civil service reports to the political executive. It is expected to remain anonymous and impersonal. My own experience is that the more an officer keeps this in mind, the better placed they are to discharge their responsibilities.
There has recently been a temptation for civil servants to build a “brand”: to run personal social media accounts and engage with stakeholders directly or through a personally appointed intermediary—blurring the line between professional and personal engagement. This can cut through red tape, but often also encroaches on the political domain and violates the established principle of bureaucratic anonymity. This could potentially lead to conflict with the political executive, which has come to expect, to the extent possible, a faceless bureaucracy.
However, to be faceless is not to be heartless. Indeed, being faceless often empowers one against being heartless. When civil servants clearly strive to observe the ideal norms of accountability, there is usually a mutual respect that follows from the political executive. In this relationship good fences (as Robert Frost puts it) do indeed make for good neighbours.
I vividly remember a piece of advice from my first mentor—to think of this relationship as one might treat a fireplace, to be close enough so that you can feel the warmth, but far enough so you are not singed. I find this advice still very applicable today.
What does it mean to be a good civil servant today? How can a civil servant seeking to both do right and do well prepare themselves to govern for the future?
To “do right” is to ensure the letter and spirit of the law, and to “do well” is getting the job done. One can choose to just do well, without necessarily seeking to do right (“the mercenary”); one can seek to do right, without necessarily seeking to do well (“the straightlaced”); one can choose to do neither (“the demotivated”). But the real gold standard is when someone chooses to get work done consistently without falling past the guardrails of principle. How does one do this?
First, as civil servants we should recognise that every single decision that passes through our hands involves at least one human being. Each case file represents something vital for someone of flesh and blood. If you try to put yourself in their shoes, the way forward usually becomes a lot clearer.
Second, build your own domain, interests, and expertise. Find something that interests you, and go down a rabbit hole (or ten). The dots will join up at some point; but more importantly, you will have created a unique basket of experiences that will override the human instinct to compare yourself with your peers.
Third, on all the dimensions that matter (speed of work, interpersonal relationships, integrity, and many more), find your own sweet spot. This is neither a sprint, nor for that matter a marathon; it is a trek across mountains. Choose a trail you like, instead of what is popular, vet your own gear, and find your own comfort level.
Finally, to be good and to do well is to make a choice every single day. That includes the days on which it is difficult to show up to work, whether for personal reasons or external obstacles. It is to be ready to work with everyone (including those you might not like to work with), on anything (including those policies you disagree with) every single day, until the day you see traction.
To quote surgeon and author Atul Gawande, whose insights on practising medicine at the cutting edge also resonate with public service in the trenches, “making medicine go right is less often like making a difficult diagnosis than like making sure everyone washes their hands”.2
There are no easy fixes in this work. A hundred steps need to go right, and everyone must pitch in, but it can be genuine good fun. This is what drives so many of us, and hopefully will drive many more.
Endnotes
- https://hbsp.harvard.edu/product/NTU318-PDF-ENG?Ntt=sircilla
- Atul Gawande, Better (2007)
