Babus, Engineers and the Sarkar: An electrifying power play

Prelude

In the Lok Sabha, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while advocating for the private sector’s role in India’s economic progress, questioned the power wielded by Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers (often called babu).

“Sab kuch babu hi karenge. IAS ban gaye matlab woh fertiliser ka kaarkhana bhi chalayega, chemical ka kaarkhana bhi chalayega, IAS ho gaya toh woh hawai jahaz bhi chalayega. Yeh kaunsi badi taakat bana kar rakh di hai humne? Babuon ke haath mein desh de karke hum kya karne waale hain?”

(Babus will do everything? Just because one became an IAS [officer], s/he will run fertiliser plants, s/he will run chemical plants. Once become an IAS, s/he will even fly planes. What is this big power we have created? What are we going to achieve by handing the reins of the nation to babus?)

Since taking charge at the Centre, Modi has expressed discomfort with the bureaucratic power centre and attempted to dilute it in stealth by bringing experts into senior administrative positions, and opening the doors to lateral entry for experts from industry, academia and society. The Lok Sabha speech was more direct, and a public denouncement of the babus (the Hindi nomenclature is considered derogatory by the IAS officers).

While IAS officers expressed their shock in hushed tones, All India Power Engineers Federation, in a press release, welcomed Prime Minister’s remarks on IAS leadership in public sector enterprises, and demanded deployment of capable engineers to lead electric utilities and energy departments. Similar demands were made by its state counterparts in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh to the respective Chief Ministers and Power Ministers.

This chain of events turned the spotlight on an undercurrent of tension between IAS officers and engineers in India’s electricity sector.

Actors and their agency

Babus, engineers and the sarkar are three key pillars of India’s development framework. IAS – a colonial inheritance descended from the Indian Civil Service – is the mainstay of the state apparatus, responsible for planning and overseeing most government activities at different levels of administration. Engineers are the backbone of industrialisation and infrastructure development in the country. The government has a principal-agent relation with both. It sets targets for IAS officers and engineers, and orchestrates their action through legislation and policy directions. Collective agency of these actors forms the core of state capacity.

Their role is no less in the electricity sector. Given the importance of electricity as electoral currency, governments take a keen interest in shaping electricity goals. Being technology driven, the electricity sector depends on engineers to keep the lights on, who invent, design, analyse, build and run the machines and systems to generate, transmit and distribute electricity. IAS officers, placed at the helm of planning agencies, utilities and regulators, are a connecting link between the two. They manage operations and oversee implementation of electricity plans.

Government priorities and approaches change with each electoral cycle. The IAS, in an ideal world, ensures coordination, precision, predictability, institutional memory and continuity across changes in political cycles. Although IAS officers do not hold permanent positions in the electricity sector, a strong cadre-wide network enabling both informal and formal coordination and cooperation across sectors and administrative levels wields power for them. Engineers with permanent employment in the sector wield power from their size and ability to mobilise, making them an important political constituency.

IAS officers and engineers, in their role in the electricity sector, are key agents of state capitalism and the defenders of public power, an institutional arrangement that facilitates centrality of public ownership and state-directed development.

The acts

How these actors interact with each other depends on the institutional structure and governance framework under which they operate. In the electricity sector, their engagement can be split into two distinct periods, governed by two separate legislations. The first was the era of monolithic state electricity boards (SEBs) that was shaped by the Electricity (Supply) Act of 1948. The second is the era of vertically and horizontally unbundled electric utilities that is prevailing at present and is shaped by the Electricity Act of 2003. 

In the SEB era, the reins of the sector were handed to the engineers who built, operated and managed the electricity systems. SEBs had an intermediate status between a classical administration and a corporation, implying an obligation to report to the state power secretary (an IAS officer). The 1948 Act permitted the states to appoint the chairman and members of the SEBs and added a vaguely worded provision to obligate the SEBs to take ‘policy directives’’ from the state government, failing which the government could remove and replace the chairman and board members. This institutional arrangement kept the engineer leaders in direct contact with the government, often bypassing the IAS power secretary. State governments exercised control over engineers through appointment oversights, while the engineers leveraged their ability to mobilise as a political constituency (SEBs were the largest state PSE, often with surplus human resource). Occasionally, states would induct an IAS officer as SEB chairman either to bring administrative experience (with electricity system exposure) or as a control over hostile engineers.

Perceived inefficiencies of this institutional arrangement necessitated a legislative change. The new law – the Electricity Act of 2003 – mandated unbundling of SEBs along functional lines into multiple utilities. New utilities were corporatized to ensure functional autonomy and improved operational efficiency, but given the resistance to privatisation, they largely remained under state ownership. Keeping with the thrust on fiscal discipline and management, the utilities were headed by administration specialists - IAS officers. Newly created regulatory commissions often had a seat for a retired IAS officer. This shift in institutional structure changed the configuration of command and control in the electricity sector, making it a hierarchical relation between the government, IAS officers and engineers, in that order.

Transfer of electricity sector management to IAS officers was a response to engineers’ inertia to reform. While this has facilitated reform interventions, the outcome has been suboptimal. Contrary to expectations, the state governments have consolidated their control over sector governance through politically aligned appointments. Increasingly, appointment and tenure of utility heads and regulators are aligned with the political cycle. Moreover, often the IAS officers are assigned multiple positions – the power secretary of the state also serving as chief managing director of utilities is a common practice – has led to conflict of interests. On the other hand, transfer of sector management to IAS officers has heightened the tension between IAS officers and engineers. Both blame the other for sector failures: management blames a lack of will to change and outdated mindsets among technical staff; technical staff blame IAS officers’ lack of technical knowledge and wishful thinking. It is also claimed that generalist administrators are often dependent on consultants for planning and project development who promote one-size-fits-all reforms without engaging with ground realities. This resentment is also evident in continuous mobilisation and protest by engineers’ associations against multiple reform proposals over last two decades.

There has been a longstanding divide between the IAS officers and engineers on disparity of pays and perks and claim to ranks. The restructuring in electricity sector has heightened these tensions to the level of hostility and mistrust in functional capabilities of each other.

Role in transition

There is no clear answer to who should hold reins of the sector. Given the technical nature and public service attributes, the sector needs specialist engineers as much as generalist administrators. However, what is clear is that the undercurrent of tensions between the actors is unsustainable and disruptive to the technology-driven transition undergoing in the sector. The ongoing energy transition, by reshaping the configuration of technology, institutions and politics in the electricity sector, will require different relationships between the babus, engineers and the Sarkar. The priority is to shift away from a hierarchical command and control relation to one that builds collaboration and coordination in pursuing the electricity goals. The government should seek to orchestrate a ‘reform coalition’ – a formal or informal mechanism and process that enables the actors to work cooperatively to address electricity challenges (as a collective action problem) through institutional and policy reforms. Such an approach will require that actors have a common understanding of the electricity problems, and incentives to work with each other.

(Environmentality is a collection of ideas, perspectives, and commentary by researchers at the Initiative on Climate, Energy and Environment, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. Views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the authors. They do not represent institutional views.)

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