Why India won’t be free until the office of DM is abolished

It is said that India is run by PM, CM and DM. The first two – prime minister and chief minister – are elected heads of government. The last one, the district magistrate, is an unelected officer of the Indian Administrative Service. If the country and the states are run by elected officials, why are the districts run by unelected bureaucrats?

India gained independence from the British Raj 69 years ago, but chose to retain one of the key mechanisms of colonial control, the civil service.

There are district ‘magistrates’ and ‘collectors’ – the terms denoting their most important jobs, law and order and tax collection.

I having nothing against IAS officers. They are fine people. As in every profession, some are good and some are bad. The problem is that they are accountable only to the chief minister. If the local MLA is from the ruling party, the DM could be subservient to him. Otherwise, s/he only has to keep the chief minister and the local party minions happy.

DMs are transferred at the whims and fancy of the government, but keeping them longer in a district won’t help. The people expect the MLA to get their work done, but the MLAs job is only to raise the people’s concerns in the Assembly.

So large are our districts that the DM’s office is simply not equipped to do everything. These days, the DM’s office oversees everything from law and order to health, education, panchayati raj, and myriad government schemes like the NREGA.

The office of the district magistrate should be abolished. The top-most IAS officer in the district should be made secretary to the head of the zilla parishad, the top tier of the panchayati raj. Once there is a politician sitting there, who has to ask for votes every five years, there will be accountability.

When the job of making sure there’s a road and drinking water falls directly upon a man who might lose an election if he can’t deliver, he’ll deliver it.

Local self-governance in India still exists only on paper, because the state capital is unwilling to give away real powers to the districts, tehsils and panchayats. Nobody wants to give away the powers they have. New Delhi is often accused of having too much power, but actually it is the state capitals that are the problem. And the office of the DM is the instrument of this centralization of power in this state capital.

The Indian Administrative Service is known as ‘the steel frame of India’. That phrase alone tells you how excessively centralised governance is. If at the ministry level the IAS officer is secretary to the minister, why is it that at levels below that the IAS officer is boss?

The responsibility of the DM to look after law and order along with the local police should be given to a judicial magistrate. This would also make policing more autonomous and less a tool of the party in power.

Not just the districts, many other bodies also need an elected head. Friends of mine made a documentary film about power theft in Kanpur. It was called Katiyabaaz. The film shows an honest IAS officer trying to prevent people from stealing electricity and paying their bills. A populist politician comes in the way and doesn’t let her do that.

My solution: make the office of the head of the Kanpur Electricity Supply Corporation an elected post. Let the elected mayor of Kanpur put his man there. Let the politician sit in that chair, and you will see him explaining people that they have to pay their bills to get the electricity.

This may sound simplistic, but it is as simple as freedom.