Received this email from my friend Ranjit. Awesome stuff. Impressed by Chairman CBDTs message (See link below).

If the average of Indian bureaucrats performance goes up even 5-10% watch out world.

Reforming the Power Behind the Throne A call to Action

FROM: Ranjit
Message fla gged

Jatar

TO:janapal@googlegroups.com

Sunday, December 11, 2011 6:23 PM

Years from now, what sort of a country would you like your children and grandchildren to live in? Would you like them to live in a country like Somalia and Congo or would you like them to live in a rich, vibrant and fair society like Switzerland or Japan? Thats one question we need to ask ourselves. The second question --- Is our current system of governance taking us in the Congo or the Switzerland direction? A bureaucrat spends 30-35 years in office while a politician can be thrown out in five. A bureaucrat is constitutionally protected against dismissal and is a permanent part of the executive, one of the three pillars in the constitution and in a corporate structure can be compared to the management while the politicians are like the board and citizens like shareholders. The legislators and the judiciary lay down rules and enforce them. The point I want to make is that the lions share of the credit of the progress that India has made and the blame for its woes goes to bureaucrats more than to any other class of people. The purpose of this note is not to blame bureaucrats. It is to inspire them. It is also a wake call to citizens to use Team Anna type methods without fast unto death to reform the bureaucracy by creating pressure to perform. India needs TRO Timebound Real Outcomes soon as otherwise the aspirations of its youth will not be met and the demographic dividend will become a demographic disaster. We do not have time to let inspiration trickle down. It has to become a torrent where all our bureaucrats are motivated to work hard and smart (on the right things). This is not as difficult as it sounds. A lot of the pieces needed are already in place. There is a department on performance management under the cabinet secretariat www.performance.gov.in which has a mandatory RFD process (Results Framework Document) which now also includes a corruption prevention plan. The sixth pay commission has a section on performance related incentives http://bit.ly/ttGYKR (Chapter 2.5). Bureaucrats are quite worried about getting a bad ACR (annual Confidential Report) and are also worried about getting transferred to punishment postings. Currently almost very bureaucrat gets rated outstanding and punishment postings are often given to honest and good bureaucrats. The point I want to make is that a citizen agitation to make the tools that are already available work well is not all that hard and can succeed in three to six months. In short the citizen agitation to create pressure for performance can deliver a TRO (Timebound real outcome). Citizen pressure is required because there are many bureaucrats who are not evil but are very happy with the status quo and resist change. They will keep resisting change and obfuscating unless there is unrelenting pressure from citizens. The greatest debt that the nation owes Team Anna is that it has awakened citizens. The confrontational parts of the Team Anna process are best avoided but must be used if the resistance and obfuscation continue. India has many things to be proud about where the bureaucracy has really delivered like the space program, missiles, telecom, IT and so on but these are isolated. We want the secretary tourism to be a leader that makes India a top 10 inbound tourism destination; we want our agriculture ministry to raise agricultural productivity in a quantum fashion and so on. India has a huge pool of talented minds and there are many corporates that can help as well. We have to inspire our bureaucrats to set ambitious goals and then take help to deliver them. We need to open the eyes of bureaucrats that nobody needs to lose. India will win, they will win, their suppliers will win and the common man will win. I was very pleased to see a message from Sh. Mukesh Chand Joshi, Chairman CBDT inspiring his department to seek quantum improvement and use RFDhttp://irsofficersonline.gov.in/Documents/Colloquium/111232011113046.PDF. Lets take how the taxpayer, nation and employees of income tax can win. CBDT collects approx 530000 crores a year. If they beat the target by 10% they will collect 53000 crores more. If say 15% of this or 7950 crores is given to employees under PRIS. Then on the average a CBDT employee (approx 60000 employees) will get a performance related incentive of 1.32 lacs. If 2% is reserved for strategic partners and if there are 2 strategic partners then each partner will get 530 crores. Infosys has only 11 customers worldwide who give it more than

500 crores in revenue. CBDT would be a top 2% customer for Infosys. Infosys would all out to win this contract and deliver. If you are a bureaucrat please start thinking about TRO and if you are not start thinking about how to compel bureaucrats to deliver timebound real outcomes.