Article - Old Smuggler

The ad campaign of a son rebuking the father for maintaining double standards while paying his Central Excise & Service taxes flashed through my mind when suddenly my excited daughter who was just granted a promotion and an impressive pay raise after only one year in to employment with one of the top notch Software company asked me innocently, "papa, how much is your salary now and how many promotions you have got so far?”

I cringed uncomfortably in the sofa while trying to answer both the questions without losing my self esteem. I looked briefly at the rows of commendation certificates and the presidential appreciation certificates, the highest possible measure of appreciation, awarded to both my wife and I over our service years for moral support but I found them to be unmoving and uninspiring as the people who issued them. At the speed of teraflops, my brain started to calculate and throw back the discomfort to people who were and still are the best parsons in this world, except the God, always and the Judges, sometimes, to answer the innocent questions.

My children were always told, as I always was by my father, a poor rustic language teacher in a remote, small, non- descript, southern corner of Orissa that merit, intelligence and hard work are essential to reach one’s goals and high positions in life. And we, both the spouses, tried to live the said principle by personal examples. By a quirk of fate, I joined the Indian Customs at Kolkata as a Preventive Officer without knowing anything about the job. For me, a small town boy from Southern Orissa, getting a job at Kolkata, one of the four largest Indian metros and the initial few months of exposures to every thing foreign spanning almost all countries of the world through their maritime trade ships and their crew was a heady feeling and I also felt that I had reached somewhere in life. The recounting of funny tales among my less fortunate classmates and childhood friends were no less exciting and riveting than a colonel’s war adventures. I worked hard on my job, applied my scientific and analytical skills to real life situations, detected cases; I fell in love and married my colleague; I was blessed with twin daughters one of whom, now asked the twin questions about pay and promotion that started all this.

The simple answers to the simple questions are that after 28 years of distinguished record of service (I don’t say this; even the president of this country says this by a written proclamation), I get less pay than the first salary drawn by my daughter and I could get only one promotion. But why there be such a pathetic situation?

How can I explain to my daughter that even the Government duly elected by all the people with equal voting rights(one person one vote) have priorities; the priority in giving good salary and good number of promotions are directed to only Group A employees. A Group A officer who joined as Senior superintendent and probated as Assistant Commissioner in 1986 has through four promotions - Deputy, Joint, Additional Commissioner, has become a Commissioner, a very good ratio of one promotion every five years. Even a Group B officer who joined in 1980 has through four promotions and is a Additional Commissioner now, again a good ratio of 5.1. How can I explain that even persons, who after failing the tougher exam. For P.O., qualified as E.O and joined in the same year have enjoyed two promotions; how can I explain that I am at present working under two officers who joined at least two years later than me? How can I explain that the many recommendation certificates hanging on the wall practically mean nothing? How can I explain that the presidential appreciation that signifies merit and work quality of the highest order is not enough to earn a promotion? How can I explain that persons who are years junior to me are my boss because they are fortunate to belong to some reserved caste? How can I explain that persons who join in the ministerial cadre also get three promotions in the time that I have spent in the department? How can I explain that I and my class, are allowed to rot through the full range of one pay scale and even after crossing the cap, nothing comes by as promotion or higher pay where as employees in Group A gallop through four different pay scales in 20 years, each transition netting a significant increase? (They are rightly called Non- functional Higher Grade!!!!). How can I explain all this? Aren’t we always supposed to believe the preaching that merit, excellence, sincerity propels you on the road to growth and success? Aren’t we supposed to believe in our great Constitution that all the citizens are equal; then how is that a certain class of Govt. servant gets five promotions in twenty/twenty-five years while the other government servants like me get only one in 28/30 years?

Aren’t we supposed to believe that persons in the same class, placed in similar situations ought to have equal rights and opportunities; then how come, a person who joined years after me in the same class as an E.O. gets earlier and more promotions than me? Aren’t we supposed to believe that the employer has a sacred duty to be good, fair and reasonable to all employees; then how come that it formulates policies that perpetrate inequality among colleagues in the same grade and class and forces seniors to become subordinates to juniors? Aren’t we supposed to believe that the Administration is always responsive and resilient to correct injustices; then how come, when such gross inequalities and anomalies surfaced and came to notice since 1990, it slept like a Puranic Kumbhakarna and still refuses to come out of his self induced slumber? Aren’t we supposed to believe that when cadre restructuring and upgradations are undertaken to meet stagnation and stunted growth of people in the organization, the exercise should bring benefits across all the cadres. Then how come the finmin and cbec sages came up and approved a plan that ensured almost 100% or more posts at the next higher level starting from Assistant Commissioner of Customs but severely constricted the growth of superintendent/appraiser promotees (numbering around 14000) by ensuring that only a few hundreds of posts of Assistant Commissioners are available. That too, by bringing in the concept of non functional higher grade and designating posts as AC/DC & J.C./Add.C.? Aren’t we supposed to believe that training and development are one of the avowed objectives of any organization to increase the quality of its employees, the effectiveness of the organization and impact of its cherished goals: then how come I or any of my class are hardly ever sent for training and development to myriads of programmes that WCOs, WTOs, UNs and other National Govts. offer? Aren’t we supposed to believe that employees across all classes, cadres, grades, groups are parts of the same Human Resources yet persons in authority, including our own Prime Minister, the Planning Czars talk only about streamlining, reforming or improving the Indian Administrative Services and the like only without any attention to others all these years.

So like the father rebuked by his pre-teen son in the ad campaign sponsored by our great department, I also grew red in face with shame but tried to conceal it with a couple of light bursts of cough and artificial attempts to sneeze and divert the attention of my post-teen daughter. Perhaps this ploy of temporary, self-induced deafness succeeded.

But the burn remains; the shame remains. Answers have to be given. God, are you listening? Lesser Gods (Prime Minister, PC, CBEC included) are you listening? Can you answer my daughter? Can you answer to yourself?

Footnote: Wondering what is the connection between the title and the text? When I joined service, the two top favourite scotch bottles on offer on board (or on display in films) are Old Smuggler and VAT69. The Old Smuggler bottle had a distinct shape. It started from a relatively narrow base, blotted up in the middle to almost double the size of the base only to continue as a long neck of very small circumference, aptly justifying the word ”bottleneck”. The whole exercise of Cadre Restructuring supposedly to remove stagnation in Customs Services, perhaps drew inspiration from the Old Smuggler bottle than any of the other professed well meant and well considered policies of growth and development of human capital in the organization. I did not know Mr. Zutshi was such a hardcore fan of the Old Smuggler. That‘s why the organization is what it is today: 8000 odd Inspectors/Pos/Eos; 14000 odd Superintendents/appraisers and now the neck starts: 700 odd ACs; 600 odd DCs and so on. Can’t anybody see that the Organisation is being strangulated at the level of Superintendents and appraisers?

Shri Umakant Mishra, Superintendent of Customs (Kolkata Customs), Risk Management Division, Mumbai.

The views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author.