A life in public service
ARVIND SIVARAMAKRISHNAN
PLIGHT OF HONESTY — The Untold Bureaucracy. G. Sundaram; Manas Publications, 4402/5A Main, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 495.
G. Sundaram adds being a meticulous diarist to having been a very distinguished public-service officer, and has written a remarkably detailed autobiography. He proceeds from a childhood — not an easy one, with unscrupulous friends and family ruthlessly exploiting his father — in Kilpattu in the then North Arcot District through an education in Adimangalam, the Madras Christian College School in Madras, and Voorhees College in Vellore to a post on the Christian College staff.
Ambitious, able, and very focused, he passed the Indian Police Service (IPS) exams, entering the police in 1960, and then, despite the disapproval of his seniors, who may well not have wanted to lose a good officer — who had also become an expert horseman — moved on into the Indian Administrative Service (IAS); he was the first to make that transition. He served in Gujarat and the then Pondicherry, where the French he acquired got him a place to study for a year and a half at the University of Brussels; his Licence Spécial, a form of M.Phil, later contributed to the development of the Indo-EEC trade links. Back in India, his work with the Leather Export Promotion Council in Madras taught him the value of at least some commercial — and technical — experience for civil servants.
Sundaram’s apparently limitless energy then got him a Delhi University Ph.D for a ground-breaking thesis on Indo-EEC trade, after which he was sent to the Economic Mission in Brussels, returned to the Gujarat cadre, and then became Secretary for Public Grievances in the Cabinet Secretariat.
Candour
The dates and events are somewhat camouflaged in a dense narrative, but Sundaram’s unaffected prose renders people and contexts, including his spells abroad, accessible to the ordinary reader. The author’s candour makes his autobiography different from many other officers’ memoirs. He is scathing about the spread of corruption and the plunder of public resources; he names names, also pointing out that many of the attitudes which plague public bodies in India permeate the private sector too. His account of gigantic lobby pressures and vicious infighting among ministers and civil servants does show how difficult governing India is; perhaps there is no such thing as India in the minds of those involved. Even India’s foreign policy turns out to be less principled than it looked at the time. The External Affairs Ministry followed Indian policy in resisting commercial links with apartheid South Africa and Israel, but when Y. B. Chavan held the portfolio he and an aide evaded what must have seemed to them only an inconvenience by allowing trade with both those states through the Bank of Bermuda.
Commitment
Somehow he seems to have retained his commitment, integrity, and sanity through all the trials and tribulations of a civil service career, and he pays fulsome tribute to his wife, a highly capable person and true helpmeet of his, who is passionate about the evils of India’s continuing mass poverty. He is blunt about much in modern India — the turning of lovely places and scenes into dirty, ramshackle assemblages of concrete boxes, the neglect and decay of historic buildings and monuments, and the terrible treatment of the workers whose labour makes billions for the owners of many industries; his homilies on how things could or should be done are understandable appeals for a better India.
Some of the problems he has detailed seem to result from the imposition of an apparently modern apparatus of state on a pre-modern and almost unimaginably hierarchical culture. Yet that is not all, for much of that apparatus itself was never intended for a contemporary republic, and many of the problems, as he troublingly notes, are features of Indian culture, however complex and varied that be.
Nevertheless, this book would be fine reading for young officers starting in public service, or in the private sector for that matter; for example, he shows how seriously parliamentary committees can scrutinise the executive. As the global economic depression worsens, public service in India will probably start to attract larger numbers of recruits, and those undoubtedly able young people will be fortunate if their service colleges use this book as a training guide and an intriguing story of public-service life.
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