This having been said, it is worth asking the question: How do ordinary citizens — namely, those citizens who are outside the government apparatus — view heftier pay packets being given to government employees and officers? Members of the general public would not cavil at all if they were satisfied with the functioning of the bureaucracy, or if they thought that higher salaries would ensure better service. Sadly, the citizenry’s view of babudom is far from flattering. We call ourselves a democracy, but if democracy means that people are the rulers, that definition falls to pieces at the ordinary citizen’s first contact with the government machinery. More often than not, the aam aadmi is made to feel helpless and humiliated, as if the clerk or officer in a government office is doing him a favour by rendering a service (which sometimes is as simple as providing basic information) that ought to be considered the fundamental right of every citizen.

The government’s — any government’s — ways of functioning are largely opaque, unresponsive, insensitive and people-unfriendly. They are tailor-made to promote delays, unnecessary paper work, irrational file movements, bribery and corruption. I rarely watch non-news programmes on television, but the one popular serial that I have always liked is ‘Office Office’, a satire on how an ordinary citizen (Pankaj Kapoor playing the role of Musaddi Lal) is harassed at every turn in a typical government department. A satire, by its very nature, exaggerates the reality and overstates the flaws of those being parodied. However, I can say, on the basis of numerous personal experiences, that India’s bureaucratic machinery tries hard to prove that even its most imaginative satirisation can only be an understatement of the tyranny that an ordinary citizen experiences in overstaffed government offices.

... contd.