India’s Amazing No-Show Civil Servant Wins Membership in the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame

I’m impressed, in a dark and gloomy way.

I thought the Italian healthcare official who showed up for work only 15 days in a nine-year period set the record for bureaucratic loafing.

Based on longevity of laxity, he definitely out-did the San Francisco paper pusher who didn’t work at all in 2012 yet still got paid $333,000.

And while it’s remarkable that a New Jersey bureaucrat simultaneously got paid for six different jobs, he presumably actually went to work every day.

But all these bureaucrats will probably be ashamed to learn that one of their counterparts in India makes the rest of them seem like workaholics.

Here are some excerpts from a report in England’s Daily Telegraph.

Even in India, where government jobs are considered to be for life, A.K. Verma was pushing it. Verma, an executive engineer at the Central Public Works Department, was fired after last appearing for work in December 1990. …Even after an inquiry found him guilty of “wilful absence from duty” in 1992, it took another 22 years and the intervention of a cabinet minister to remove him, the government said. India’s labour laws, which the World Bank says are the most restrictive anywhere, make it hard to sack staff for any reason other than criminal misconduct.

Needless to say, Mr. Verma deserves election to our Bureaucrat Hall of Fame.

And I suppose there are two broader public policy lessons to this story.

1. If you’ve ever wondered why Indians in America are so successful in America while Indians in India are relatively impoverished, bad policy is to blame, with restrictive labor laws being just one example. Yes, India has implemented some reforms, but if you check the data from Economic Freedom of the World, you can see there’s still a long way to go.

2. There’s nothing wrong with unions if they’re operating in a non-coercive setting. But when the governments tilt the playing field with pro-union legislation, bad results are almost inevitable. And the greatest problem isn’t necessarily above-market wages, but rather inefficient work practices such as an inability to fire bad performers.

P.S. If you like bureaucracy humor, here’s a message from the California public works department.

This Michael Ramirez cartoon shows how taxpayers get squeezed when politicians and bureaucrats negotiate.

We also have this flowchart on bureaucratic operations which was probably developed at DHS or HUD.

And this anecdote shows how congressional budgeting and bureaucracy intersect.

Here’s the famous satirical video on overpaid firefighters in California.

Last but not least, here are two very good posters that capture bureaucrats in action, as well as link to other amusing bureaucrat humor.