Careful With Discretionary Powers

Context: An analysis of the vices of policy discretion in Indian administration.

Governance issues in India: Due to discretionary decision-making.

• Heavy regulation: Despite the economic reforms of the 1990s, the Indian economy remains heavily regulated – yet to take concrete steps towards ‘Maximum governance, minimum government’.
  • The ordinary citizen has to expend considerable time, money and energy unproductively merely to comply with a plethora of laws that govern him or her.
• Complex laws: Governor-general George Curzon attributed the complexity in India’s laws and policy to the complexity of the Indian mind.
  • After Independence, the tradition continued, with the new Indian ruling elite replacing the old British one.
  • Jawaharlal Nehru introduced stringent restrictions on imports, installed production capacities and foreign exchange.
• Heightened corruption: Robert Klitgaard, one of the world’s best known anticorruption strategists, argued that corruption increases when public servants are vested with greater discretion and decreases when such discretion is reduced.

Negative consequences of discretionary policymaking/governance:

• Implementation issues: When a policy does not fit into the psychological routines or checklists a junior official creates for himself, he will distort it or interpret it to accord with his thinking.
  • Officials at the interface with the public struggle with huge caseloads, ambiguous and conflicting goals, and inadequate resources have little time or inclination to ponder over what policymakers intended.
• Unaccounted impact on citizens: Compliance costs may increase significantly if one is required to maintain more records, file more returns etc.
• Increased litigations: In India, in 2019, there were 60,000 cases pending before the Supreme Court, 44 lakh cases before the high courts, and over 3.10 crore cases in the lower courts.

Way forward

• Regulations should always be light, easy to implement and comply with. The official on the spot who implements them should be encouraged to take timely decisions when problems arise.
• Insist that policies shall be exercised transparently and officials should be held accountable for decisions.