FROM BUSINESS WORLD OF 3 OCTOBER 2006
Government as a
racket
I recently hired
a car at Bombay airport. The driver turned out to be unusually talented. He
gave me numerous tips on how to make Indian ceremonial food – like what to do
when in cooking Rajbhog or Shira. Since I am a culinary illiterate, the tips
were wasted on me, but I was impressed by his mastery of the minutiae.
I asked him what
he was doing driving a car if he was such a good cook. He said that he was
actually a watch repairer. He came from a poor family, and Aga Khan Trust had
put him through a residential school called the Ashram. We passed a wooded
estate near Marve Beach belonging to some charitable trust, and he recalled how
he stayed there for a fortnight on a trip organized by his benefactors. In this
Ashram, he and his fellow children were given practical training that would
make them independent later in life. That is how he came to learn cooking as
well as watchmaking.
I asked him why
he was not repairing watches. He said he had a cubicle whence he operated on
some road in north Bombay. He paid Rs 2,000 in rent, and made Rs 1,500-2,000 a
month besides. But his shack was considered an encroachment. One day the
municipal bulldozers came and leveled it. He could have got another shack, but
the demolition drive had raised rents. Now a similar cubicle would cost Rs
6,000 a month; he could not afford it.
But he was not
happy driving a rental car. The renting agency made much of its money driving passengers
coming from abroad. For some strange reasons, international flights arrive only
at night. So my driver had to work at the most inconvenient hours, and got
barely five hours at home – if he was lucky. He had a wife and child, and
wanted to see them more often.
He thought he
had found the right answer – a government job. he met the man who would get it
for him. He got to know the leader of the Bombay airport trade union, who has
the same surname as a famous Maratha dynasty. This man told him that for Rs
25,000, he would fix him a job in Airport Authority of India (AAI). To show
that he was earnest, he took my driver to Delhi and into the bungalow of a BJP
Member of Parliament from Madhya Pradesh who lives round the corner from Sonia
Gandhi. He introduced my driver to the MP’s secretary, and told him his work
was done. That was over a year ago, and my driver still has not got the job.
When he asks the trade union leader, the leader tells him to go and do his
worst.
The leader
cheated my driver; and it is implausible that he cheated my driver alone. This
sort of criminal activity is not worth the risk unless it is done on a large
scale. So it is likely that the leader is running a racket. In which case, it
cannot be a racket to deprive gullible people of Rs 25,000 each. Every man
cheated creates an enemy, and the risk of being beaten up, done to death or
thrown into jail multiplies. Hence the racket most likely involves fixing
people in jobs in AAI. That would require collusion with someone in the
government or someone who has influence over government appointments; and who
better than a Member of Parliament who sits in a Parliamentary Committee
overseeing the aviation ministry? So prime facie, I would suspect a Delhi-based
racket; the trade union leader is likely to be just a commission agent.
It is a well
established statistical fact that government jobs pay more than comparable
private sector jobs. And they offer complete job security. So if they were
auctioned, they would fetch a premium. They are actually being auctioned; what
my driver did was to pay the premium. His problem is that since this is an
illegal market – a hawala market in jobs – if he does not get his due for the
premium he paid, there is nothing he can do.
Such auctioning
of jobs led to indiscriminate creation of jobs irrespective of need; that is how
all governments in India got overmanned. But that was in the 1970s; there has
been little expansion of government employment in the past two decades. The
auctioneers’ solution was to create pseudo-government institutions to which the
ban on job expansion did not apply. AAI is one of those. It rakes in enormous
revenue by taxing flights and airlines, and can employ unnecessary drivers,
whose jobs are placed at the disposal of people like our MP to make a
buck out of. That is why I think that the less the government does, the better.
