The scope for corruption increases when control on the public administrators is fragile and the division of power between political executive and bureaucracy is ambiguous. Justify.
Approach :
Introduction
Introduce with the contractual nature of relationship between executive and civil servants and its actual position
Body
Discuss how the relation between executive and bureaucracy is generating corruption.
Discuss corruption vis-a-vis accountability and limited institutional mechanism
Give some examples.
Conclude
Conclude with various reports of committee/commissions which highlighted this point.
Answer
A healthy working relationship between executive and civil servants is sine qua non for good governance. This reflects a contractual relationship between the state and its bureaucrats and more broadly between the state and its citizens .
While the principles governing the roles and responsibilities of Ministers and civil servants are well defined in political theory, in the actual working of this relationship this division of responsibility becomes blurred with both sides often encroaching upon the other’s sphere of responsibility.
In any democracy, executive is responsible to the people through Parliament and therefore the civil servants have to be accountable to the executive. However, an impartial civil service is responsible not only to the government of the day but to the Constitution of the land to which they have taken an oath of loyalty.
At the same time, implementing the policies of the duly elected government is a core function of civil servants. That is why the division of responsibility between the civil servants and executive needs to be more clearly defined, in absence of such segregation, a fragile public administration results in corruption.
Corruption is most often defined as “the misuse of public office for the pursue of private gain”. However, corruption is being increasingly referred to as any breach of trust, malfeasance of intended duty, or failure to deliver in both practice and spirit for any agreement when the purpose is the gain of just one of the parties.
The tendencies of corruption increases further with limited scope of horizontal accountability and curtailed extent of vertical accountability through institutional mechanism.