Green or Blue ?

This anecdote shared by Arun Shourie when he was Minister of Administrative Reform gives a good insight about the process of decision making in India's bureaucracy. The incident is shared by Shourie in Edward Luce's book, In spite of the Gods: The Strange rise of Modern India. Edward Luce, is a former bureau chief, India of Financial Times.



The grave matter, which was to take almost a year to resolve and would consume the valuable time of some of India's most senior officials, concerned whether civil servants should be allowed to use green or red ink, as opposed to blue or black normally used to annotate documents.



After several weeks of meetings, consultations and memoranda, the IAS officers in Shourie's department concluded that the matter could be resolved only by officials at the Bureau of Printing. Another three weeks of learned deliberation ensued before the bureau returned the file to the Ministry of Administrative Reform, but with the recommendation that it should consult the Ministry of Training and Personnel. It took another three weeks for the file to reach that ministry since the diligent mandarins at Administrative Reform needed time to consider the expertly phrased deliberations of the Bureau of Printing. And so this question of state meandered for weeks and months, in meeting after meeting through ministry after ministry, before the following Solomonic compromise was struck : ' Initial drafting will be done in black or blue ink. Modifications in the draft at the the subsequent levels may be made in green or red ink by the offices so as to distinguish the corrections made,' said the new order. Heirarchy also had to be specified : ' Only an officer at the level of joint secretary and above may use green or red ink in rare cases [duly set out, with appropriate caveats].' As Shourie noted, it was ' A good bureaucratic solution : discretion allowed but circumscribed!' If Franz Kafka had inserted this into one of his novels, critics would have accused him of going too far.