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• It is in the supervisory neglect of routine tasks that the seeds of poor governance lie. Any supervisory authority must come together with supervisory responsibility. For example, chief commissioners of income tax should, by this principle, have authority- and therefore the corresponding responsibility- to deploy their subordinate commissioners as they find fit. As things stand, though, it is the central taxes board and the minister concerned who exercise this authority. Yet, if the officers are then discovered to be negligent in their new posts, the board or minister are not held even remotely answerable. On the other hand, since chief commissioners do not decide the commissioners’ deployment, they can claim helplessness.
• Poor governance arises essentially from corrupt practices and negligence or dereliction in official conduct. Both can be tackled, if supervisory responsibility is effective.
(From the article under the title “India’s bureaucracy works in feudal matrix. Little wonder corruption and poor governance flourish in our country”, by Anil Dhar, a freelancer)
