INDIA IN TRANSITION. The much maligned public servant

In an effort to enhance accountability within the State, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a new surveillance system to monitor the attendance of public employees. The Biometric Attendance System requires employees to clock their time in and out of the office using fingerprints and a unique attendance identity number that is connected to Aadhaar.

At present, more than 50,000 central employees spread across 150 departments have enrolled in the programme, and their daily comings and goings have been made public on the website: attendance.gov.in. The dominant narrative, put forward by Indian media outlets, suggests that public employees are now on their toes.Still, questions around how surveillance information will get used and what disciplinary actions may follow remain unclear. The long-term goal, presumably, is to disrupt the prevailing culture of apathy and poor work ethic in sarkari offices.

Central to this approach is the view that public employees, like all individuals, are pre-disposed to shirking, exerting minimal effort on the job. The solution entails using hierarchical power to ensure compliance.

It is worth taking a step back to reflect on the underlying ills facing the Indian bureaucracy, and whether public surveillance systems offer a cure.

In their book, Working, Shirking and Sabotage , political scientists John Brehm and Scott Gates offer an alternative perspective. They find that top-down rewards and punishments are insufficient. High performance at the workplace stems from bureaucrats’ own commitment to the work at hand, the degree of appreciation and esteem they receive from their peers, and the existence of professional standards. A parallel set of studies on private firms similarly find that an ethos that encourages participation, decision-making and feedback by subordinates improves organisational performance.

India’s Biometric Attendance System draws its inspiration from the first of these models. Control at the top, informed by biometric surveillance data, by that model, can inculcate a culture of high performance among lower echelons of the state.

That approach conforms to what I refer to as India’s “legalistic” state. A legalistic state promotes strict adherence to rules and hierarchies. A legalistic model offers several pathways to low motivation among India’s public employees, including a lack of hierarchical oversight and discipline.

To be sure, India is not the only place where legalism prevails within the State. Cases vary widely across countries and time periods, from the Nigerian education bureaucracy today to the Chicago Police Department prior to institutional reforms that took place in the 1990s.

Nor is legalism the only factor inhibiting the Indian State’s performance. The politicised system of bureaucratic postings and transfers is another inhibiting factor. By more standard measures of administrative capacity, such as the quantity of employees staffing various public agencies, the Indian State is demonstrably weak.

Among these various limitations, the Modi government has chosen to address the problem of top-down oversight and discipline within the State. By ensuring a tighter adherence to the rules, employees may exert greater effort at work.

There is an element of truth to this theory. To function well, all states must, at minimum, be bound by rules. And yet, rules alone are not the defining feature of well-functioning states. Effective public agencies must have, inter alia , adequate human resources with skills, training and organisational capabilities. Perhaps more than anything, they require a sense of public purpose, a vision towards which public officials can strive. And for all the good intentions behind it, India’s Biometric Attendance System conveys little in the way of public purpose.

It is hard to imagine how such a system could possibly engender a positive shift in work culture. Take, for example, the high incidence of absence among government school teachers. With more than a quarter of these employees absent on any given day, India’s public education system is effectively crippled. To be sure, weak monitoring systems may embolden some teachers to shirk duties. The absence of the danda alone cannot possibly explain such alarmingly high rates of absence, not to mention poor quality teaching.

My own interviews with 150 government primary school teachers reveal a broken system. Low motivation in this case is not due to weak monetary compensation. Government school teachers in India are paid more than five times the country’s mean per capita income. The comparable multiple for wealthy countries is 1.2.

But missing entirely are the intangible rewards associated with work. Professional norms and standards, which traditionally provided school teachers with sense of morale and professional identity, have been decimated by a school system that no longer treats teaching as a profession worthy of status.

The potential long-term ramifications of the public employee surveillance system need to be considered. For one, the system may further stifle the kind of bureaucratic innovations necessary to address the country’s most pressing problems. Innovation calls for creativity, collaboration, and productive forms of rule-breaking.

Legalistic norms within the Indian state make it incredibly difficult for public officials to coordinate efforts across agencies and solve problems collectively. Agencies vehemently defend their internal hierarchies and external fields of influence.

Judith Tendler’s classic work on good governance in Brazil shows that informal rewards and recognition can motivate public service employees, even in the most difficult circumstances.

Although monitoring attendance is important, how a Biometric Attendance System can produce the kind of bureaucratic effort needed to implement public policy well is difficult to apprehend. The knowledge that they’re being monitored and evaluated based on their whereabouts may deter employees from doing anything that could be misconstrued as “unofficial” Bureaucrats may find it preferable to stick to their official roles and avoid spending the extra effort. A second, and perhaps even more pernicious, consequence of the Biometric Attendance System is the culture of distrust that it can breed.

One must ask whether the benefits of surveillance outweigh the costs. The costs involve a downward dynamic in which institutionalised distrust induces further suspicion and fear within the state, generating additional rules and tighter systems of institutional oversight.

A downward dynamic is already visible in India’s legalistic state. From the Lokpal Bill’s attempt to combat corruption through the creation of a super-agency, to the Right to Education Act’s itemised checklist of school norms, the state has learned to respond to governance failures with tighter regulatory prescriptions.

The Modi government’s zeal cannot, on its own, activate high performance. It can show the way for more comprehensive administrative reforms that address the state’s systematically poor performance.

The writer is an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. This article is by special arrangement with the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania