My Father, page 9
On 13 November 1954, Sukhadia became the chief minister. He was a second-generation leader and the youngest chief minister in India at the time. He remained chief minister of Rajasthan for seventeen long years, till July 1971, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi unceremoniously removed him and sent him to Karnataka as governor. His mistake was that in the 1969 presidential election, which had pitched Gandhi against the organizational wing of the Indian National Congress, he had sided with the latter.
Like many of his cabinet colleagues, Bholenath too had disapproved of the working style of Vyas during his second term. But when the vote of confidence took place, he voted for Vyas because he considered him to be head and shoulders above Sukhadia as a leader. That, of course, meant that he was not included in the new cabinet, and my father became potentially available to serve with another minister. Sampatram, one of the members of the new cabinet, whom Father had known for some time, approached him with the offer to join him as his private secretary.
But at this juncture, my father felt that he had served as private secretary to ministers sufficiently long and it was time for him to begin serving as an officer in one of the departments in the secretariat. He conveyed this decision to the minister, but promised that he would fill the gap till he could find a suitable regular private secretary for him. He delivered on that promise within a couple of months and returned to the Government of Rajasthan as assistant secretary. He was initially posted in the appointments department for three months, but was moved to his regular position as assistant secretary, medical and health department, in March 1955.
Father served in the state of Rajasthan for another twenty-one years till his retirement on 30 June 1976, at the young age of fifty-five. During these years, he got only one promotion, to the post of deputy secretary, in February 1967. This was one step below the top bureaucratic position of secretary in those times. He did not reach the top position because all secretary-level positions were reserved for members of the Indian Administrative Services (IAS). He did try to transition into the IAS through selection, but luck turned out not to be on his side in this endeavour.
My father was selected for the Rajasthan Administrative Services (RAS) in May 1960, which offered a wider track to eventual selection in the IAS than the Rajasthan Secretariat Services (RSS), to which he belonged. But joining the RAS would have required moving from district to district in the course of his work and would have therefore interfered with his children’s education. By this time, he knew that we were good at studies and had good prospects for future careers. Therefore, he chose to stay with the RSS, which guaranteed him location in Jaipur till retirement.
Given his exceptional performance, unmatched by any other officer of his rank, the state government recommended him for selection to the IAS on at least two occasions. But in the end, he lost out to rival candidates on both occasions. Each time my father knew in his heart of hearts, as did the selected candidate, that he was the superior candidate. But he never let the selected candidates feel that they had been given the prize that justly belonged to him. On the contrary, when one of the selected candidates came to see him the day after his selection was announced, Father received him with great warmth and profusely congratulated him. Ravi remembers to this day witnessing the event and feeling a sense of disappointment, knowing that the selected candidate, a veterinarian, was a completely mediocre choice for his post.
The day my father retired, Chief Secretary Mohan Mukherjee told him that the chief minister wanted him to continue and had already approved his re-appointment for two years. But with the prospect of many years of active life still ahead of him, Father had different plans. He told the chief secretary that he had already accepted a private sector offer and did not wish to continue in the government any longer. The chief secretary asked him to nevertheless see the chief minister before leaving office, but my father told him that he would rather avoid the embarrassment of having to turn down the request of the chief minister in person. He therefore paid him a visit a week later.
6
Building Post-Independence India
FATHER MISSED THE OPPORTUNITY to join politics and thus serve in a leadership role in the state. He was also denied the chance to become a member of the elite Indian Administrative Services, which robbed him of any prospects of reaching the top rank in his profession. Yet, he served the nation with distinction by first helping bring an end to the more-than-a-millennium-long hereditary rule in Mewar state and then contributing to the building of the state of Rajasthan immediately following its formation. He understood administration better than any of his colleagues, whether junior or senior, adhered to the highest standards of integrity, worked hard with clear focus, placed public interest above all else and had the courage of conviction. Unlike most of his colleagues, he read widely and kept abreast of all the important developments within the nation and internationally. A few highlights from his years in the state administration provide concrete evidence of his contributions to the well-being of the state and its people.
During the first term of Jai Narayan Vyas as Rajasthan chief minister, spanning 26 April 1951 to 3 March 1952, my father served as private secretary to Balwant Singh Mehta, minister of industries, mines and commerce. During this period, the issue of renewal of lease for mica mines to the influential industrialist Ramnath Podar came up. Twenty years earlier, the Maharaja of Jaipur had granted a twenty-year lease for the mines in the entire erstwhile state of Jaipur to the industrialist. The lease had a provision that it could be extended for another twenty years, subject to both parties agreeing. It had been a lucrative lease for the Podars; naturally, they wanted it extended. Accordingly, they applied for extension for another twenty years.
With a positive recommendation by the secretary, the Department of Mines and Geology recommended to the industries minister that the lease be renewed. When the thick file landed on the minister’s desk, he asked my father to study it and prepare a summary of it for him. When my father carefully examined the file, he found that there had been a large number of complaints against the Podars for recovering mica through surface mining rather than deep mining. Moreover, after extracting mica, they had left the trenches and pits exposed and had not filled them back with sand. This had led to the creation of standing waterbodies during the rainy season, which served as breeding grounds for mosquitoes and resulted in the spread of malaria. My father was also aware that the new Constitution of the country disallowed private monopolies. He included these points in the summary he prepared for the minister, which led the latter to turn down the application from the Podars for renewal of their lease.
Mehta’s decision created a bit of a stir in governmental as well as industry circles. The powerful industrialists’ lobby denounced the government, arguing that after such treatment no industrialist would ever invest in the state. The Podars met the chief minister, who too was surprised by the industries minister’s decision. He wrote to the minister stating that while he had no view on the merits of the case, it was incumbent upon him (the minister) to take the approval of the cabinet in a matter involving a lease of such large value. The minister replied saying that since the lease had been expiring, it had required no decision by the ministry. The ministry was simply taking possession of the mines on which the incumbent’s lease had expired. Had the ministry wanted to renew the lease, a decision would have been required, and in that case he would have surely sought the approval of the cabinet. The chief minister had no choice but to accept the reply and did not pursue the matter further.
But the story did not end there. Ramnath Podar was a national-level industrialist with wide reach in the central government. He approached the Union minister for natural resources and scientific research, Sri Prakasa. The latter sent Minister Mehta a telegram, advising him to reconsider the matter to avoid a ‘public scandal’. Mehta felt insulted and asked my father to draft a telegraphic reply to Sri Prakasa. Father drafted a sharply worded response, stating that the decision of the state government was in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution, and the matter being within the jurisdiction of the state, the Union government had no business interfering. The draft reply further stated that the state government strongly objected to the use of the expression ‘public scandal’ by the Union minister. When Father showed the draft reply to Mehta, the latter suggested clearing it with the chief minister. My father told him that the chief minister would never approve of such a reply, and a very different reply would have to go in that case. Mehta agreed, and approved dispatch of the draft at his own risk. My father had the telegram dispatched without the chief minister knowing about it. No follow-up reply came from the Union minister.
On the day the lease expired, the state government took over the mines with the beat of drums. It was then that my father sent the telegraphic correspondence between Sri Prakasa and Mehta to the secretary, Department of Mines and Geology. Soon, the correspondence became a subject of conversation among the officers and staff in the secretariat. When the chief minister heard of the matter, he congratulated Mehta for his courageous action. A few weeks later, Mehta went to Delhi to attend a conference where Sri Prakasa was present. To Mehta’s surprise, the latter apologized to him, explaining that his officers had misled him on the matter. Sri Prakasa, a senior Congress leader at the national level, was known for his humility. When Mehta returned to Jaipur, he related the story to my father and thanked him for giving him the right advice at the right time.
By the time Sukhadia became chief minister of Rajasthan in November 1954, my father had already served as private secretary to three ministers. Though another minister in the Sukhadia regime wanted him to work with him, Father felt it was time for him to move on to one of the departments of the state government. Accordingly, he worked for the minister temporarily, until he could find a suitable replacement. That done, he asked the government for placement in one of the departments. As a stop-gap arrangement, he first served for three months in the appointments department and, beginning in March 1955, moved to a regular position as assistant secretary in the medical and health department. Hierarchy-wise, this was the third-ranked bureaucratic position within the department, with the position of deputy secretary immediately above and that of secretary at the top.
My father firmly believed that public money must be used with care and for the public good. He was also a courageous officer. Therefore, if he saw public money being misused, he would not hesitate to take necessary action, even if such action was against powerful individuals and carried the risk of personal harm. I recall asking him once whether it did not make for an uncomfortable existence for an officer if most of the others around him were corrupt while he tried to discharge his duties honestly. His reply was that it was always the other way around. The corrupt were the ones who feared the honest officers around them, even if they greatly outnumbered the latter.
Soon after my father joined the medical and health department, he had to deal with a difficult case of financial impropriety. It involved a highly influential medical doctor who also held a senior administrative position in the government. It was widely believed that the doctor knew Chief Minister Sukhadia well.
It so happened around this time that most district hospitals lacked X-ray equipment and also suffered from shortages of medicines. Therefore, the government had approved a sum of Rs 2.5 million for purchase of these items at the influential doctor’s request. Though the doctor bought some medicines with the funds, he spent most of them on the purchase of a fleet of vehicles from a dealer who had been unable to sell it in the open market. Having spent the entire amount, the doctor submitted papers to the medical and health department for regularization of the purchase, ipso facto. The secretariat was a small place, and its corridors quickly became rife with speculation that there had been corruption in the transaction.
In the Indian bureaucratic system, a file begins its journey with the lowest-level official within the department and then moves up the hierarchy. Accordingly, the file containing the request for regularization of the expenditure eventually landed on my father’s desk. When he examined it, he found that it was upon receiving an SOS from the doctor for the purchase of X-ray equipment and medicines for district hospitals that the revenue department had approved the sum of Rs 2.5 million. But the doctor had gone on to purchase vehicles to be used as ambulances in the district hospitals without any requisition from district medical health officers. Indeed, a number of district hospitals already had ambulances. Furthermore, he had purchased vehicles and medicines without so much as even seeking informal approval from any government official. My father recorded all these irregularities and stated in his tough note on the file that the purchases were wholly irregular and that the scarce resources provided by the revenue department had been wrongly utilized. He recommended that a high-powered committee needed to investigate the entire matter. He also recommended that the finance department be made aware of the case since the Office of the Accountant General would raise objections to the purchases in due course.
The file next went to the deputy secretary, whose first action was to show my father’s note to the doctor. The latter was naturally very upset. The hapless deputy secretary held the file for some fifteen days and then submitted it to the secretary, with a note stating that the purchases were made in the public interest and therefore were worthy of regularization. The secretary called a meeting of the doctor, the deputy secretary and my father to sort out the matter. At the meeting, my father said that he had already recorded his views on the file and had nothing to add. The doctor defended himself, and the deputy secretary passionately supported him, arguing in favour of regularization of the purchases. The secretary patiently listened to all that the three had to say and later sent the file to the finance department, stating that the purchases were irregular and that the doctor needed to be pulled up.
In the finance department, the additional secretary examined the file and agreed with the view my father had put forth. He sent the file to the chief secretary, an ICS officer, recommending that an inquiry be set up to investigate the scandal. The chief secretary in turn called up my father and congratulated him for his courage in taking the side of truth without fear or favour. He sent the file to Chief Minister Sukhadia, advising that the inquiry be entrusted to a retired high court judge.
In the meantime, the doctor went to the chief minister and pressed him for my father’s transfer. Having heard only one side of the story, the chief minister sent a note to the appointments department, asking them to move my father to another department. The chief secretary intervened, however, and told the chief minister that if officers were punished in this manner for doing what was right, they would be demoralized. Instead, they needed to be protected under such circumstances so that they could discharge their duties fearlessly. The chief minister got the message and dropped his instructions for the transfer.
His stand having been vindicated, my father went to the chief secretary a month later and requested that he be transferred to another department as a show of deference to the chief minister. The chief secretary saw merit in my father’s suggestion and sent him first for training to the finance department in April 1957, and then moved him to the public works department in June 1957.
Later, as predicted by my father, the Accountant General included in his annual report a paragraph recommending action against the doctor for his transgression in spending Rs 2.5 million. But no action actually followed, perhaps because the doctor was to retire after a short while and had made invaluable contributions to the state in the line of his profession. He had been a pioneer in certain areas and hundreds of thousands of people in Rajasthan had benefited from his medical services.
Between June 1957 and October 1963, Father worked in three different departments: public works, irrigation and appointments. He made important contributions to the work of each department, but I will eschew their detailed discussion here. His next major venture worthy of detailed recall is the building of the Malviya Regional Engineering College, which is now known as Malviya National Institute of Technology and enjoys the status of an Institution of National Importance. The story of how my father got this institution off the ground in record time testifies to his ability to implement projects with great efficiency and at minimal cost to the taxpayer.
The second Five-Year Plan, covering the years 1956–57 to 1960–61, had envisaged numerous industrial projects. Implementation of these projects was critically dependent on the availability of qualified engineers. Keeping this in view, the central government had launched a scheme to establish a regional engineering college in each state. Accordingly, a decision was made to establish a regional engineering college in Jaipur. The government appointed Professor V.G. Garde, former principal of M.B.M. College in Jodhpur, as the principal of the new college, which was to be named Malviya Regional Engineering College. The chief secretary of Rajasthan, B.S. Mehta, asked my father if he would take on the challenge of getting the college built and started on time. His role would be that of officer on special duty (OSD) and first registrar of the institution. My father accepted the challenge and took over his new duties on 1 November 1963.
