In Rajasthan, accountability has recently discovered a rather dramatic sense of urgency.
A ten-minute technical glitch at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rally in Banswara, when the screen briefly went blank, was apparently serious enough to cost senior IAS officer Archana Singh her post as Secretary, Information Technology and Communications. When technology fails in front of the Prime Minister, someone must answer for it.
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But the episode does raise an awkward question: if 10 minutes of digital embarrassment can trigger such prompt administrative action, what should we call the years of technological misery endured by taxpayers navigating the government’s digital portals?
Consider the Income Tax portal. Since its launch, businesses and professionals have endured a steady parade of login failures, payment glitches, slow processing and those spectacular deadline-day crashes. In several instances, taxpayers were unable to complete filings or make payments because the portal simply would not cooperate. Yet penal ties and interest continued to accrue with bureaucratic punctuality.
The GST portal has its own long history of “temporary technical issues”. The MCA portal, too, periodically greets users with errors, downtime and mysteriously vanishing forms. Courts have had to intervene more than once. Professional bodies have pleaded for deadline extensions. And countless productive hours have been lost wrestling with systems meant to make compliance easier.
And yet, curiously, such persistent glitches rarely seem to trigger the kind of accountability seen in Banswara. This leads to the obvious conclusion that tech failures matter most when they cause political embarrassment, not when they inconvenience taxpayers. A blank screen at a rally is visible.
A crashed portal on filing day is experienced quietly by millions. The first is a spectacle. The second is merely compliance. In the hierarchy of technological failures, some glitches are apparently more equal than others.
Legal theatre
Turf wars in babudom rarely make for dramatic headlines, but they do occasionally produce excellent legal theatre. Kerala has just provided the latest episode.
The Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) has gently but firmly reminded the state government that rules governing civil services are not to be treated as optional reading. The immediate issue was the appointment of an IPS officer as Kerala’s Excise Commissioner, a post designated under the IAS cadre.
The state government evidently felt this was a perfectly reasonable administrative choice. The IAS fraternity, however, thought otherwise and marched to the tribunal. CAT, after examining the rulebook, sided with the obvious: an IAS cadre post can be occupied by an IAS officer only.
The tribunal did not stop there. It also pointed out that other positions such as Director General of the Institute of Management in Government (IMG) and Director of the Kerala Institute of Local Administration (KILA), are likewise IAS cadre posts and cannot be casually handed to non-IAS officers or even retired IAS officers.
To the uninitiated, this may appear like classic babu hair-splitting. If an officer is capable, why obsess over which service they belong to? But in India, those distinctions are not cosmetic. Cadre rules are designed to preserve institutional balance, ensure career progression, and prevent governments from reshuffling senior positions like pieces on a chessboard.
Of course, governments often prefer a bit of flexibility, especially when trusted officers are involved. Civil services, meanwhile, prefer something less flexible: the rulebook. And that is precisely what the CAT has chosen to enforce.
Babus on the spot
When a chief minister asks babus for “honest feedback”, it sounds refreshingly democratic. Almost revolutionary. But in our administrative culture, that phrase can also cause a few raised eyebrows in the Secretariat.
That was the moment in Telangana recently when Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy asked senior IAS officers to give candid feedback on the government’s performance so far. The idea is to help assess progress and fine-tune governance as the administration moves forward.
In theory, this is exactly how the system is supposed to work. The Westminster model India inherited was built on precisely that principle: babus speak frankly in private, ministers decide in public.
But practice, as always, has its own peculiar logic.
Over the years, babus have perfected saying things without quite saying them. File notings are carefully calibrated sentences. Opinions arrive wrapped in layers of caution. Candour, while admirable, can occasionally prove hazardous to career stability.
Which is why Revanth Reddy’s call for blunt assessments is both admirable and slightly amusing. To be fair, the exercise appears part of a broader push to improve governance and accelerate key initiatives. Telangana’s leadership wants quicker implementation and better administrative coordination as it pursues ambitious investment and development plans.
But the real test here is cultural, not procedural. Will babus truly speak their minds? And perhaps more importantly, will the system welcome uncomfortable truths rather than quietly penalise them? If that culture takes root, Telangana’s experiment could strengthen governance.
