“Another time, we were transferred to Bikaner,” says Meenu, “and I had discretionary authority over people’s jobs, which meant I was very powerful.”
“Meenu was the first woman bureaucrat to be there,” Amit adds. “Men didn’t know how to address her. They used to call her Sir.”
“When we arrived, all the small business owners came queuing up to offer favours. The dry cleaner said, ‘Please use my shop,’ and I asked him for a price list. He was very offended. ‘It’s free, Madam.’ Because these people want access to senior bureaucrats and they will pay for it. The payback comes when they bring people to your house in your private time and ask for favours. ‘Please don’t send my brother-in-law to a less attractive posting.’
“For instance, the man who worked the platform going towards Delhi made a lot of money from tips and bribes from passengers wanting to get on the train, whereas the platform going in the other direction made much less. What most bureaucrats do is to rotate people among these jobs. So those who have the lucrative positions have to lobby to hold onto them.
“At another time, I was in charge of New Delhi railway station. Every day 1 lakh [$2,000] used to come up from the ticket windows and was distributed to officers.”
“Have you ever bought a ticket at those windows?” says Amit. “Have you ever wondered why it’s such a nightmare? It is deliberately kept like that. Half of Indian chaos is the deliberate strategy of the bureaucracy. Because if things were efficient, there would be no reason to pay bribes. Ticket counters in stations are big sources of unofficial money.”
“At the centre of this business is the man behind the reservation window,” explains Meenu. “When I arrived in Delhi I got a call from a cabinet minister who wanted to propose a particular candidate for this job. I was astonished that one of the most powerful people in the country would personally make a call about the ticket seller in New Delhi station whose salary is maybe 6,000 rupees [$120] a month.
“I wanted to improve work conditions in the station. I felt that my workers were not getting decent breaks. I went right back to the railway regulations written by the British, to see what the rules were about employee breaks, and I found that they were supposed to have two fifteen-minute breaks a day. I got rid of the tea boy who came round serving tea to people while they worked, and I set up a special tea room where people could relax in their breaks.
“But unknown to me, this caused a big problem. Because the real significance of the tea boy was not that he delivered tea but that he took away all the accumulated cash from the reservation windows. There could be a raid at any time and if you’re caught with all that cash you have no way of explaining it. So the tea boy was the person who took it away and kept it until the end of the day. He was essential to their livelihood. They were furious when I took him away. I’m sure he’s back again now.
“Such things made me very unpopular. I was disrupting the entire economy of the station, and everyone felt I was their enemy. Once the vigilance inspectors came round to check what was going on. They are the people who investigate corruption, and they’re obviously highly corrupt. They collect bribes and they’re foul-mouthed. They insult everyone. The unions wanted me to shut them out, which I refused to do: in fact, I was quite happy about them coming.
“The unions are very big in stations. They have links to the top and they’re very powerful. They got 500 people to surround me, shouting in chorus, ‘Meenu Sharma murdabad!’ (‘Death to Meenu Sharma!’). Just because I let the vigilance inspectors in.
“Nowadays, the first thing I do when I go to a new posting is get rid of all the chairs in my office so that large numbers of people cannot sit down. They like to intimidate you like that. It’s difficult to get people out when they are sitting.
“People also play the caste card a lot. There was a man who used to come to me every day when I was working in the station to say, ‘My name is Sharma.’ I used to think he was an idiot, telling me his name every day. I’m naive about these things. It took me so long to realise that he was telling me he was from the same caste community as me and therefore expected special favours.
“But I ended up gaining respect there. Because I made no exceptions. If you make exceptions, you make money, but you also arouse resentment. I would transfer everyone, according to the rules. No one could pay to avoid it.
“In my early years in the railway service, I had an amazing boss. He was a very intelligent man who really taught me how to do my job. His lesson to me was that all documentation had to be well argued. You couldn’t just write, Request rejected. Enormous money was at stake and people could always come back afterwards and accuse you of things. Why did you reject that request? He was a wonderful mentor to me. He worked very hard, and he used to keep the most amazing documentation.
“Later on, I discovered he was exceedingly corrupt. He could make precise arguments for anything but they were always the arguments that earned him the most money. While I was working with him, he was looking to purchase cleaning equipment for Indian railway stations. He asked me to draw up a detailed comparison of all the products on the market. But what I only knew later was that one multinational company had paid him a large fee to give them the contract. He did very extensive research and then he wrote the tender such that only his client’s equipment could fulfil it. It looked like an open tender, of course, but the guidelines only matched one company.
“He was very smart. He could never be caught on file. He worked very long hours — he used to call me at 6 a.m. from the office.”
“People make a lot of money,” says Amit. “They have the same problem as criminals: where do they hide their cash? A couple of weeks ago one of our senior colleagues was found with 10 lakhs [$20,000] concealed in his toilet cistern.”
The bureaucracy is a vast cash generator, which is why there is so much cash in the Delhi economy. In central Delhi markets you see hundreds of banknotes in customers’ wallets. The big jewellery stores feel like banks, which is, in a way, what they are: people use them to convert cash into gold, many thousands of dollars at a time. The cashiers’ desks are noisy with the constant whirr of counting machines flicking banknotes.
The ultimate destination, however, for all this cash, is property. It is still common in Delhi for people to pay for 60 per cent of, say, a $4 million property in cash, a practice which has been clamped down upon much more quickly in, say, Mumbai. In Delhi the booming, multibillion-dollar property market owes its very existence to the constant need to offload large amounts of cash, so things do not change so fast. In any property deal the two key pieces of information are the price of the property and the proportions of ‘white money’ — declared money, paid by cheque or bank transfer, and ‘black money’ — cash.
Amit says, “Friends of my parents in Patna say to them, ‘You have not one but two bureaucrats in the family! Soon you will have more cars and houses than you can count!’ Unfortunately, they don’t know us.”
He grins.
“They gave me a job in vigilance,” says Meenu, “investigating corruption. I registered charges against several senior bureaucrats, which was a huge insult. They removed me very quickly. They never expected me to do that.
“Getting a reputation as a difficult junior is a serious thing. If you don’t laugh at a senior’s jokes, if you’re not corrupt enough, if you make your boss look bad in front of his boss — you get a reputation for being difficult, and you don’t get promoted.