Today is Excise Day
For a change let me assume I am still a Central Excise employee.
Our image is certainly not all that good, what with the CVC categorising us among the most corrupt and a few top officers getting caught by the CBI. We are accused of being corrupt, lethargic, slow, arrogant, and ignorant and an impediment to real collection of duty. The huge revenue is believed to be coming not because of us but as the oft repeated cliché would say, in spite of us.
The other day I went to a registrar’s office to get back my flat purchased with a government loan. He did not offer me a seat. Brokers who demand money openly do most of the work in his office. You go to a Commercial Taxes office; you are accosted by ignorant and arrogant staff. It is not Government offices alone which treat you badly. The private sector is not any better. You go to a school for admission of your child, you are treated worse than a beggar is and they fleece you to death. Rude behaviour and arrogance coupled with ignorance is perhaps a national trait associated with any one who thinks he has a little power.
In spite of all the evils associated with us, I can confidently say we are much better. Visitors to our offices are treated far better than in other offices. Letters are often actually replied to. It is not really difficult to meet senior officers of the department right up to the Chairman. Our laws/ notifications/circulars are actually published (often and if they are not, we in TIOL will bring them to you) and are available to the trade. Our adjudication and appellate mechanisms are fairly good and fair.
It is said, “if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys” But for less than peanuts we have one of the best human resources reservoirs in the country. Our officers at all levels are highly educated and almost every other officer is a Law graduate. I had a chemical engineering graduate working with me as a UDC. I had a Sepoy who was a Post graduate and a graduate in Law! I felt ashamed when I was asked to take the services of a private engineer to ascertain the annual capacity of a re-rolling mill, when my Inspector was a Post graduate in Mechanical Engineering from an REC. I feel sad when I was asked to take the help of a cost accountant when my Inspector was a topper in the ICWAI examination. I felt humiliated when semi literate computer ‘experts’ swarm our offices and give us advice on how to run our electronic systems when we have an army of qualified computer whiz kids.
Maybe computerization arrived in our department from the wrong end. I remember in the eighties, first the computer tables arrived and were promptly installed in the rooms of the senior officers where they were used as dining tables. Then the Air Conditioning machines arrived. They were promptly installed in the rooms of the senior officers. AC for the AC was more important than AC for the computers. Then the computers arrived and there was no place for them. They were kept in the rooms of the clerks where they still remain.
We have everything; we have nothing! We are the best; we are the worst! A department of contradictions!. Sometime back a Chief Commissioner told me, “You have done a good thing by leaving this wretched department”. I know it was officers like him who made the department wretched and took all the benefits from the department.
Though the officers are underpaid, we should remember that for each one in the department there are a hundred others, better qualified and ready to do a better job at half the salary, out on the roads in search of a job. Your bosses may not give you good postings, you may not be rewarded for good work, but there is a poor farmer, a poor worker, a poor nation, which is paying you. We are Servants, not masters; you have more responsibilities than rights. Once we realize that we are servants and our job is to serve, nothing else really matters. All the humiliating experiences, all the injustice, all the infirmities of cadre review will pale into insignificance when we realize that we are also small cogs in the great machinery of the Government of India in the job of changing the status of the small poor unfortunate underfed Indian. There is no humiliation worse than hunger and this job gives us enough to keep us and our families away from hunger. That itself is greater than any cadre review posts. Let us try to give back to this nation a little out of what we have taken from it.