My Father, page 11
The O&M department was directly under Chief Secretary Mehta, whom my father had known for a long time. Within a few months of Father joining this department, Mehta retired. He had served in this position for eight years, from May 1958 to October 1966, with a break of one year in between. He was extremely popular among the secretariat staff, and they gave him a rousing farewell, with the chief minister and most of the members of his cabinet attending the event.
My brothers and I have always believed that Mehta was the villain in the matter of our father’s career in the Government of Rajasthan. Father had served in the state of Rajasthan since its inception, and in the United State of Rajasthan prior to that. He had been known for his impeccable administrative skills, efficiency, integrity and courage throughout the secretariat. Mehta too had observed his functioning first-hand, since the appointments department, where my father had served from July 1960 to October 1963, was directly under him. Yet, after more than sixteen years of service at the time of Mehta’s retirement, my father had not been given a single promotion. Indeed, according to Ravi, who once overheard Father talking confidentially with a friend, his name had come up for promotion once during Mehta’s tenure as chief secretary. But Mehta turned it down, noting on the file that he was too junior to be promoted.
Yet, never once did my siblings or I hear Father utter a single critical word about Mehta. His unfair treatment at Mehta’s hands notwithstanding, Father remained full of admiration for him. He always spoke of him with utmost respect and applauded his many attributes and accomplishments. He would always credit him for the lead Rajasthan had taken in establishing Panchayati Raj in all of India. He would note with admiration how Mehta gave priority to elected representatives such as panchas, pradhans and zila pramukhs over bureaucrats. He also took pride in pointing out that he was the first bureaucrat in the country to be honoured by the President of India with the Padma Shri.
In contrast to Mehta, his successor, Chief Secretary K.P.U. Menon, took no time to formally recognize my father’s talents and contributions. He joined on 29 October 1966, and by January 1967 had promoted my father to the position of deputy secretary. Fortunately, immediately upon taking charge as chief secretary, Menon had appointed my father as staff welfare officer in addition to his charge as assistant secretary, O&M. In this new role, my father quickly attended to the grievances of numerous employees and pensioners. He resolved the cases of dozens of retirees that had remained pending for years. In a similar vein, he expedited the cases of seniority, pay fixation and promotion of a number of employees. That was sufficient for Menon to recognize his value as an officer and reward him with the promotion. The secretariat staff celebrated my father’s promotion with great joy. We, the family members, got a hint of it when a member of his staff brought home a large stock of garlands in the evening. It was a great moment of joy and pride for us all.
My father’s first appointment as deputy secretary was in the Department of Education. This meant that he had to move out of the chief secretary’s office. Menon had been so pleased with his work as staff welfare officer, however, that he asked him to continue to serve in that role. But that arrangement did not work very well. Therefore, rather than relieve him of his duties as staff welfare officer, Menon brought him back to his office as deputy secretary, Cabinet. Father worked in the twin roles for the following three years.
In January 1970, the government appointed my father as secretary of the newly formed State Agro Industries Corporation. Chandan Mal Baid, a former minister in the Sukhadia cabinet and a future finance minister of the state, served as the chairman of the corporation. A key function of the corporation was the allocation of tractors among potential buyers. Imports of all products in India were subject to strict licencing in those days. As far as the sale of imported tractors in Rajasthan was concerned, only the corporation had the licence to import a fixed number of them each year. Therefore, it enjoyed a monopoly over their sales. But, being a public-sector entity, the corporation had to sell the tractors on a no-profit-no-loss basis. That in turn meant that the number of those wishing to buy tractors far exceeded the number of tractors available. Therefore, some rule had to be devised to select buyers from amongst the applicants.
This situation carried great potential for corruption as well as prospects for charges of corruption, even if no corruption actually took place. Luckily, both Chairman Baid and my father were individuals of great integrity. Together, they decided that the most transparent way to allocate the tractors would be by public lottery. Accordingly, they opted to allot 95 per cent of the tractors by lottery. They left allotment of the remaining 5 per cent of tractors to the discretion of the chairman. This was done in anticipation of demands from influential politicians, as is common in India whenever non-price mechanisms are applied to allocate something in short supply.
The full transparency of the system notwithstanding, members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) in the Opposition took no time in alleging that there was corruption in the allotment of tractors and that tractors were being diverted to Pakistan. The speaker of the Legislative Assembly at the time was N.N. Acharya, who had served alongside my father in the United State of Rajasthan government and had chosen to return to politics after the formation of the state of Rajasthan. Responding to the uproar, he appointed a committee of fifteen MLAs to investigate the matter. The leader of the Opposition, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, who later served multiple terms as the chief minister of Rajasthan and one term as vice president of India, acted as the chairman of the committee.
The committee examined my father’s role in the allocation for three days straight, looking into the allotment of each and every tractor, whether by lottery or through the discretionary quota of the chairman. It could not find a single case of allotment by lottery that was not according to the set rules and procedures. As for allotment under the discretionary quote, every single tractor was found to be allotted to worthy individuals who had agricultural land, with no sign of any corruption. My father also pointed out to the committee that some of its members themselves had received tractors through the chairman’s discretionary quota.
With no adverse findings, the matter ended there, and the committee was dissolved. It was so embarrassed that it did not even submit a report. Later, when my father asked one of the MLAs on the committee why they had failed to submit a report, he sheepishly answered that the report in this case would have only benefited the ruling party. After that episode, no questions were raised on any matter related to the corporation during the time Baid and my father were still presiding over it.
Elections to the Legislative Assembly were held in July 1972. By this time, in July 1971, Indira Gandhi had already ousted Sukhadia as chief minister and sent him as governor to the state of Karnataka (then called Mysore) for having sided with her opponents in the 1969 presidential elections. Barkatullah Khan, another Congress leader, now served as the chief minister. In the elections, the Congress scored a big victory, winning two-thirds of all seats in the Assembly. Baid also won his election and was appointed the finance minister of the state.
During his tenure at the Agro Industries Corporation, Baid had developed unshakeable confidence in the ability and integrity of my father as an officer. Therefore, unsurprisingly, upon becoming the finance minister, he picked Father to be the deputy secretary in the finance department. From June 1972 till his retirement on 30 June 1976, Father worked in this department. He found these four years to be the most exciting of the more than twenty-five years he spent in the government. In addition to the sensitive excise department, he held the charge of state insurance, local fund audit and accounts services during these years.
Among the challenges in the excise department, the biggest one was of raising adequate volumes of revenue. The main source of excise revenue in the state was the tax on country liquor. In the many years prior to my father’s taking charge of the department, the big liquor contractors had systematically pushed out the small contractors, thereby stamping out a key source of competition. With the big contractors relatively few in number, they were able to form a cartel of sorts. They would grease the palms of the officials and contribute generously to the election campaigns of politicians to maintain their stranglehold on the sector. While their profits soared, excise revenues suffered. They came to have a determining influence on not just the state excise policy but also on the postings and transfers of excise officials who implemented the policy.
At the instance of the big contractors, the state had adopted a policy of auctioning of liquor shops in groups instead of individually. By definition, small contractors lacked the resources to bid for a bundle of multiple shops. Big traders then colluded to distribute the different clusters of shops among themselves at bid prices that they had already negotiated between themselves. The auction was thus only in name. Despite the manifold increase in the consumption of liquor in the state, excise revenues had remained static. Baid, the new finance minister, felt that this was an unacceptable situation.
The finance department took the decision to break the cartel of the liquor barons. My father dropped the policy of auctioning shops in lots and began auctioning the shops individually. That immediately drew a large number of players into the auctions. The excise revenue went up from the Rs 80–90 million of earlier years to Rs 120 million in 1972–73. Finance Minister Baid was pleased by this success, but not for long.
It was inevitable that the big traders would mount a counter-attack. Their opportunity came when the government opened auctions for the following year, 1973–74. On the eve of the auction, the traders announced that they would boycott it. The result was that only the small shops got taken, with no bids coming for the liquor shops in large cities such as Jaipur, Ajmer, Kota and Ganganagar. The stakes were high for the government, since the shops in these large cities contributed the lion’s share of the excise revenue.
With the finance minister firmly behind him, my father was not about to back down. He decided to let the state-owned Ganganagar Sugar Mills run the shops for which no bids had come. Of course, the running of liquor shops hardly being the business of a state-owned public sector enterprise, the government experienced a sizeable loss of revenue. The policy came under criticism, but my father refused to yield. Soon the contractors’ lobby began sending feelers for reconciliation, but he paid no heed to them.
In February 1974, the government began preparing for the auction of shops for year 1974–75. Anticipating that the big contractors might boycott it once again, this time around Father decided to invite some of the big contractors from Uttar Pradesh and Haryana to bid for them. That proved to be the undoing of the contractors’ lobby. All the big contractors returned to the table. The ensuing intense competition brought the state a whopping Rs 190 million in excise revenues. The increase more than made up for the tiny loss incurred the previous year. The following year, 1975–76, revenue went up further, to Rs 210 million, without any increase in the quantity of liquor issued from the state warehouse to the contractors. The liquor barons did not raise their heads again, at least till my father retired from the government.
As deputy secretary in charge of state insurance, my father faced a different challenge. A director, assisted by half a dozen junior officers, headed the operations of this department. All of them, including the director, had risen from the ranks, and from within the department. Therefore, they had difficulty exercising control over their former colleagues, who were represented by a powerful employees’ union. In late 1973, the union went on a lightning strike, meaning, they struck work without any prior notice. Their principal demand was for the removal of the director. With Barkatullah Khan having died unexpectedly due to a heart attack in October 1973, the veteran politician Hari Dev Joshi was the chief minister at this time. He intervened directly and accepted the employees’ demand. The director of State Insurance was removed. But that raised the question of his succession. No IAS or even RAS officer was willing to take the hot seat. In the end, the finance minister asked my father to take charge of the department in addition to his other duties.
My father remained the director of state insurance for one year while looking after other departments in his portfolio. During this year, he solved nearly all the problems of the staff, filled a large number of vacancies at the clerical level, put officers on their toes and restored discipline among the employees. He did this without recourse to harsh measures such as suspension, demotion and dismissal.
The key to bringing order to the department turned out to be the transfer of a few dozen ‘black sheep’ employees to places where the department had limited operations. That narrowed the scope of damage that these employees could do to the department’s work by vitiating the work environment. As is common in the Indian system, Father came under pressure to cancel some of the transfers. He knew that if he reversed even a single decision, the powerful employees’ union would see to it that he reversed all his decisions.?Unfortunately, however, among the ‘black sheep’ he transferred was the son of the chief minister’s brother. When the brother knocked on the chief minister’s door to have the transfer cancelled, the latter called my father to his office and asked him to do the needful. My father explained to the chief minster that if he were to cancel his nephew’s transfer, the employees’ union would be up in arms and force him to cancel all transfers. The progress he was making in bringing discipline to the department would then be wiped out in one stroke.
To his credit, the chief minister understood the problem and concurred with my father. He immediately turned to his brother and told him to advise his son to work hard in his new position, else he might face the prospect of being transferred yet again to a truly distant and isolated place such as Jaisalmer or Barmer. The matter ended there. To my father’s good fortune, this story leaked out and had a salutary effect on the union and employees. They understood that my father meant business. Every employee, without exception, joined his new position by the stipulated date. The authority of the director was re-established and employees returned to performing their assigned duties. That in turn brought relief to hundreds of retired employees who had been waiting to be paid the insurance amounts due to them.
Another reform worth a brief mention, which my father was able to implement to the benefit of the state employees and pensioners, concerned the role of the accountant general in the disbursal of salaries and pensions. Whenever an officer was transferred, went on leave, earned annual increment or was promoted, the accountant general was required to issue a new pay-slip. Similarly, the accountant general had to sanction the pensions of all retirees, from Class IV employees all the way up to the chief secretary. Unfortunately, the office of the accountant general was notorious for delays in discharging these routine duties. It took numerous trips by the employee and the pensioner to the office to get new payslips issued or pensions sanctioned. This was particularly burdensome in the case of employees living in cities other than Jaipur, where the office of the accountant general was located.
Upon reviewing the Accounts Code, my father discovered that it was up to the state government to give the authority to issue payslips and sanction pensions to the accountant general and that it had the power to withdraw such authority. But setting aside one or two states, none had shown the courage to exercise that authority. My father advised the government to withdraw the authority from the accountant general. Initially there was some hesitation, but the government eventually concurred with my father’s proposal. Once it made the decision, it immediately withdrew its authority to the accountant general to issue payslips. It took a little longer in the case of the accountant general’s authority to sanction pensions, since the number of cases involved was rather large. But both reforms got implemented, bringing relief to a vast number of employees and pensioners.
As deputy secretary in charge of accounts services, Father also worked to bring justice to the Rajasthan Accounts Services officers. He discovered that no effort had been made to establish seniority among these officers for a very long time. The result had been that no Departmental Promotion Committee (DPC) had met to consider promotions for these employees since as far back as 1956. Father got the seniority established in consultation with the Public Service Commission and got the DPC appointed to decide on promotions of officers. The DPC finally confirmed a large number of officers who had been officiating in senior positions for many years.
The story of my father’s contribution to the betterment of the lives of people will be incomplete without a discussion of the role he played in the development of his village, Suwana. This was the place where he was born, where he spent the precious years of his childhood and saw his mother struggle with dignity and pride. The village and its people always remained very dear to him. He would often tell my mother that the land of Suwana was very dear to him and that he intended to return to settle there after retirement. That, of course, did not happen, but he did the next best thing: use every opportunity that came his way to develop the village and improve the lives of the villagers.
It may be recalled that as early as 1943, at the initiative of the Mewar Praja Mandal, he had helped establish the rural-oriented Gram Vidyalaya (village school). In addition to providing education to children in Suwana and nearby villages, that school became a focal point of many social and cultural activities. The school hosted such eminent scholars as Ramnath Suman and Makhanlal Chaturvedi. Mewar Praja Mandal leader Manikya Lal Verma visited the school many times. Even the great Sarvodaya leader Jayaprakash Narayan came to speak at a Sarvodaya conference that the village hosted. His ninety-minute speech at the event left a deep impression on my father.
After the formation of the full state of Rajasthan, Father had joined its first government as private secretary to Bhure Lal Baya, the minister for the Public Works Department (PWD). The government had decided that it should build one pucca road in every region of the state. My father suggested to Baya that in Mewar region, priority be given to linking the granary in Uparmal, where Bijolia was located, to Bhilwara. This would provide better connect to foodgrain producers and consumers. The proposal was in the overall public interest, but for my father it also offered the side benefit of bringing the first pucca road to his village, since it lay on the route between Uparmal and Bhilwara.
