A Committee a day

Perhaps in his formative years at Gah, or later in college, Dr Manmohan Singh studied a subject called moral science and was taught that a sin of omission is worse than one of commission, and that not acting is on par with sinning! Which could be why the prime minister is determined that every problem should be addressed by as many commissions or committees as possible. The latest instance was the all-party talks on Kashmir where as many as five committees were set up to study everything from A for autonomy to G for governance! On the thorny issue of extending reservation without decreasing the number of seats available for open competition in institutes of higher learning, an Oversight Committee has been set up to take cognisance of what technical committees report on the feasibility of implementation. It need not take too long for Dr Singh to set up another panel to consider the agitating students’ demand for a judicial commission to evaluate the effectiveness of reservation.
Time was when President Harry Truman of the US had a sign on his desk in the White House saying, “The buck stops here.” Dr Singh would probably amend that to “A committee will decide where the buck should stop, assuming that another committee has decided that the buck should stop!” Dr Singh is not the first to realise the advantage of using committees to mothball a problem. Bureaucrats unwilling to take a decision, which could affect their career have played it safe by setting up committees to study the problem until it hopefully disappears on its own! In a 1960 edition of the New York Herald Tribune, columnist Richard Harkness defined a committee as “a group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary”. And so what if, as the US diplomat Dean Acheson once quipped, the final committee report “is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer”!

-- The Economic Times Editorial dated 31st May 06.