Many people in India, rich and poor, long for greater accountability in public institutions. The widow who has no news of her pension application, the sanitation worker who has not been paid for months, the helpless victim of an inflated electricity bill, the truck driver who is held to ransom by corrupt tax officers — all share a common desire to see public employees and institutions being held accountable for fair execution of their duties.
There has been much discussion of this issue, and some action too. In 2005, the Right to Information Act made a major contribution to greater accountability in public authorities by setting new standards of transparency, enforceable in court. Some states have also put in place improved grievance redressal facilities — and even new laws.
During the last ten years, however, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. The powers in New Delhi have shown far more interest in holding citizens accountable to them than the other way round. Many public institutions have also been turned into pliable servants of the government.
Reviving efforts to bring more accountability in public institutions would certainly be useful. But accountability has its limits as a means of ensuring that public institutions function for the common good. Essentially, accountability works by creating a system of penalties and rewards for pre-specified duties of public employees. However, many actions of public employees are difficult to micro-manage in that way, and even if it is possible, it may not be helpful to pre-arrange a system of tasks and fulfilments. Further, the carrot-and-stick approach tends to work within a restricted and pre-understood domain, without tapping the employee’s own initiative and creativity.
To illustrate, there is no great difficulty in monitoring the attendance of a school teacher, but how does one ensure that he or she teaches with dedicated energy and enthusiasm? One crude answer, advocated by some, is that teacher salaries should be linked to pupil achievements. A school, however, is not just a coaching centre. Quality education is also concerned with children’s well-being, abilities, behaviour, values and all-round development. Some accountability mechanisms can foster quality education, but all of them have their limits. For one thing, it is difficult for an external observer to assess what a teacher does, let alone the relation between a teacher’s actions and their possible outcomes.
We must recognise that accountability is only one aspect of a much broader concern for responsibility. A teacher may act responsibly because she is accountable to others, but also because of her own motivation for being a good teacher and helping students to develop their capabilities. To invoke another example, it is not accountability that led countless doctors, journalists and relief workers in Gaza to continue treating the wounded, reporting the events, and feeding the hungry even as bombs rained around them (sometimes even on them). Most of them must have acted out of their own commitment to the people of Gaza or to the ethics of their profession.
The distinction between accountability and responsibility is important for at least two reasons. First, a sense of responsibility can be an immense force for social progress. Accountability can induce people to do what someone else wants them to do, to the extent that it can be monitored. Responsibility, on the other hand, includes what people themselves want to do in the public interest. This self-motivation can be a great source of initiative and creativity, well beyond the realm of accountability. Indeed, the development of a culture of responsibility has played a key role in the emergence of well-functioning public institutions around the world — not only schools but also hospitals, libraries, museums, courts and parliaments.
Second, accountability and responsibility also differ in terms of the means that can be used to promote each. Sometimes, accountability measures also help to promote responsibility. For instance, a habit of punctuality at work may be easier for someone to sustain when she knows that everyone is expected to be punctual. This is a case in which accountability and responsibility complement each other. But it is also possible for them to move in opposite directions. For instance, a hierarchical environment may promote accountability even as it saps responsibility by demotivating those in subordinate positions. Similarly, centralisation may promote accountability even as decentralisation may foster responsibility. Despite frequent complementarities, accountability and responsibility have their own domain.
Jaipal Singh Munda, the leading spokesperson of Adivasis in the Constituent Assembly, provided an interesting example of the value of promoting responsibility without invoking accountability measures. One of his first initiatives as sports minister of independent India was to convene a cricket match among members of Parliament of all parties. This seems to have had the effect of creating a better rapport among them. As Jaipal Singh himself observed: “The match, the lunch at the National Stadium and the dinner, achieved a great thing. They brought together all political parties and a friendly atmosphere developed in both Houses of Parliament.” His intention in promoting this “friendly atmosphere” was not just to make life more pleasant in Parliament but also to enable Parliament to function better. Alas, little is left of that atmosphere today.
As this anecdote illustrates, responsibility often has a cooperative aspect. A principled individual, of course, may act responsibly whatever others do — like the pedestrian who insists on waiting for a green light to cross the street even as others troupe forward. But most people find it easier to abide by responsible behaviour when others do the same.
This basic observation has far-reaching implications. One of them is that irresponsibility can take the form of a ‘social trap’ where people reciprocate each other’s irresponsibility even as they would all prefer to be part of a responsible environment. Many Indian schools look like they have fallen into a trap of this sort. The other side of the same coin is that collective efforts to escape the trap may be rewarding: there is also a self-sustaining state of affairs where different people’s responsible attitudes reinforce each other. The literature on social norms includes many examples of ‘multiple equilibria’ of this kind.
It is often forgotten that the entire edifice of electoral democracy rests on a simple act of cooperative responsibility: voting. Every voter knows that his or her vote makes no difference on its own, yet many people — often a large majority —– do vote, sometimes in difficult circumstances (say, walking long distances or queuing for hours in chilly weather). Voting has many possible motives, but quite likely, many people simply think of it as an act of responsible citizenship.
The critical role of responsibility for a healthy social life has been well discussed by many eminent thinkers over the ages, including a number of leading economists. Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, emphasised that what we do is influenced not only by our own goals but also by “general rules of conduct” that emerge from introspection about how our actions are likely to be viewed by others. Alfred Marshall, often seen as the founding father of neo-classical economics, began his magisterial Principles of Economics with an extended discussion of the power of “unselfish service” and even wrote that “the supreme aim of the economist is to discover how this latent social asset can be developed.” B.R. Ambedkar considered that liberty and equality “could not become a natural order of things” without “fraternity”, a strong form of responsibility that “leads an individual to identify himself with the good of others”. Ideas of this sort may have taken a back seat in mainstream economics today, given its enchantment with ‘homo economicus’, but they have not lost their relevance. What early economists knew, we can know too.
