Episode 7: Rai Mahimapat Ray- Transforming the Grassroots- Lessons in Indian Administrati
About Rai Mahimapat Ray, “Ray”:
My next guest on The One Percent Project is Rai Mahimatpat Ray. He is the District Magistrate, Collector & Deputy Commissioner of Ranchi, Jharkhand, India, Indian Administrative Service (IAS) - Government of India. A district magistrate is an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer who is the chief in charge of the administration and governance of a district in India. Ray is responsible for the well being and development of the 3.3M people living in Ranchi district, which has a diverse demographic spread across remote villages without developed roads or schools to upcoming cities where universities and businesses successfully thrive.
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In this conversation, he talks about:
The Indian Administrative Services, the progress, the challenges and the opportunities Indians.
How IAS officers like him are working to better the lives and mitigate the challenges an everyday Indian faces.
Talk about the COVID situation in Ranchi and measures he has taken to keep the pandemic in control.
All views are personal and don’t represent the views of Govt. of India or Govt. of Jharkhand.
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Transcript:
*The transcripts are not 100% accurate.
Pritish: Welcome to the One Percent Project. I'm very excited to have you on the show.
Ray: Hi Pritish, It's good to meet you after all these years and thanks for having me on board.
Pritish: Can you tell us who is an IAS officer, and how do you become one?
Ray: So the Indian administrative service or the IAS for short is an Imperial legacy in that sense of the world. It was created effectively post the British period. But it is a direct successor of the Indian civil service, which was created to kind of administer a large colonial enterprise. Why it was renamed was because in an administrative service was then supposed to take on a more developmental and proactive role. But many of the structures that govern the IAS remain still the same as they were in the imperial period. For example, the office that I work with that is the district magistrate oblique collector oblique, deputy commissioner. These were fixtures or titles that are given specifically because collector of land revenue, which is now a marginal function rather a collector custodian of land records, or deputy commissioner in the sense of, powers of a judicial magistrate or district magistrate for ensuring law and order. These were basic gambets that used to be there in the pre-India period. However, now, with the coming in of a slight welfare state and with a mind providing citizen enabled services, the mandate is much larger. So Indian Administrative Officer effectively is the CEO of the district. A district is effectively a county or a large administrative geographical area. For example, in the case of Ranchi, it's about 5,500 square kilometres with a population of about 3.3 million. Now any of these citizens are indirectly or directly monitored by the district magistrate. Whether it is as simple a eulogy that I give is from the time citizen wakes up in the morning to the time he sleeps, wakes up again almost 95% of all his daily activities in some way, linked to the district magistrates office. For example, if you were to go to the bathroom, you switch on plumbing. If the water is failed, then that is at some level a problem of the drinking water and sanitation department, which has a committee, which is headed by the chairman as the deputy commissioner. If electricity has failed, there is a superintendent committee for monitoring electricity. Step out on the road, whether it's demarkation for roads and acquisition for road, whether it's encroachment removal for roads, whether it's a demarcation of zones for roads, those aspects also come directly or indirectly under the deputy commissioner's office. So you have about close to a hundred verticals With about each vertical, having close to depending on the manpower availability that is there approximately each district hires or has about close to about 25,000 government civil servants. Whether they may be a teacher, they will be doctors; they may be engineers. They may be a service infrastructure, and the district magistrate is suppose to be a coordinating agency, as well as the superintendent agency and is also a point of contact for any sort of disaster or coordination. And that is where the role of COVID comes into play.
Pritish: Before we get into COVID and I read your article, on how you have been able to manage the COVID situation, can you tell, how do you become an IAS officer?
Ray: The Chinese invented the exam method and the British kind of made it better. The administrative services is an examination that happens every year, it's a three-stage examination process, approximately .9 million people take it, and about 180 enter the IAS, and others enter the other allied service or may opt for foreign service or the police service or the income tax or the revenue, and about 900 odd people make it. It's a three-step process, you'll have an MCQ based exam, and then you have a written based exam and an opinion based exam, and then you have an interview finally.
Pritish: Coming to the COVID situation. I read an article on how you have been able to manage the situation specifically in your district. Tell us how you have been able to work through it to get it under control?
Ray: I think, any situation, which is in many ways, not been predefined, like the COVID situation. It is very difficult to say that you have it under control. What best you can do is mitigate the effects, both on the positive, as well as the negative side. The positive, I mean, for example, having establishments in place, which can handle patients, having methods in place by which COVID patients can be tracked. Any contacts that they have can be screened and then evaluated for testing and mitigating the spread, so to speak. The positive measures would obviously be being able to provide relief to people who have been adversely affected by the lockdown especially the senior citizen, or it is the young children, or it is those that are particularly vulnerable. For example, cancer patients, HIV positive patients, sex workers, transgender, LGBT communities, and the like. So both fronts. One of the things that we realized in Ranchi was that as a team, we needed to be able to stay slightly ahead of the curve and our learning was made easier simply because you were able to learn from the experience of others. Thankfully Jharkhand was slightly behind the curve as far as India is concerned. And India was slightly behind the curve when it comes to Italy or Spain. So there'll be learnings that we could take out, for example, the use of ventilators. So we realized early on that ventilators may only be required for 2% - 4% of COVID patients. So we focused on having COVID care centres that people can be isolated in a place which has a certain amount of medical practitioners so that if anything goes south, they can be shifted. So our focus was not on ventilators rather on setting up establishments where they could be monitored. Also, because this is a period of lockdown, we found that there was a huge pool of very skilled resources that were available as part of our volunteers. They were drawn upon and they really really helped us. In being able to combat any problem that came up and obviously as a situation like COVID in any disaster, decision making has to be on the fly. But in COVID, especially with limited sources of information, especially credible information, any plan that was made had also had to have a certain degree of flexibility. I think that was one of the key learnings for me.
Pritish: You mentioned that there were certain segments which had a higher impact, sex worker or AID patients how did you manage them? Because if I look at a sex worker, as you've mentioned, how do they even survive and what kind of precaution can they take?
Ray: initially the biggest problem was that workers are not willing to identify themselves because as you know, that it has a legal and a social stigma attached to it. We used our outreach through civil society, volunteers who helped us identify them and also bridge the gap so to speak. We had an Initiative called each one, feed one, which was essentially an initiative where each person donated just 2000 rupees, which is close to about less than about 50 dollars and that initiative allowed each family to get dry rations. So basically survival food for over a month that allowed them that liberty, to be able to survive also the civil society organisation reached out to them, made them understand that for the time being it is in their interest to avoid any sort of physical contact.
Pritish: I'm sure you would have also had to go to the situation of all these migrant workers coming back from Maharashtra, which is one of the highest hit States with COVID, cases and Gujrat as well. How did you handle that situation?
Ray: So Ranchi was the destination for the first Samik train, Samik train means migrant train. Ranchi being a major transit point in Jharkhand obviously handled a very large amount of migrant labour returning back, and one of our first primary cause of concern was to be able to isolate them because they may be carriers asymptomatic or with symptoms. Having isolated them, we also needed to provide them with immediate food relief. As a result, the Govt. of Jharkhand came up with a scheme whereby each a migrant was given ration for 14 days so that they could be quarantined in their own homes. Without actually having any of their family members having to step out. Any high-risk patient who was screened and was found to be suffering from symptoms of influenza were then moved to a government free isolation facility, and held there for 14 days and tested and then let go. However, the biggest challenge that comes is once the migrant labour comes back. Because the reason for migration is the same as you Pritish or I have is not enough job opportunities in the place where we lived. Tomorrow there is going to be a problem. And so the same issue is now coming up. We're trying to mitigate it by having a census. By the census, I mean, we are doing a skill mapping, of which skill each migrant has, and trying to get them absorbed in the local industrial and more importantly to formulate a long term action plan. So they don't have a reason to leave again. At least some of them should be absorbed. Those that are willing to live, definitely some actually want to go back, but those that do not should be absorbed. And the Govt. of Jharkhand in that sense has actually made a plan. As of right now for a temporary measure, they'll be given relief under the MNREGA, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act one of the largest, but that is a short term measure, the long term measure being they should get meaningful gain free employment in their home village or home district.
Pritish: How do you assess the COVID situation of India presently across the whole country?
Ray: I will not be a very good judge of the COVID situation across the country. I can tell you about Ranchi per se. In Ranchi, we had a strategy which was high testing, high contact tracing and severe containment. In the sense that even if there's one patient that is diagnosed in a particular locality, we identify each of his contacts approximately each positive leads to got 40 to 60 people. Who are then screened, sampled, tested depending on their condition and isolated for 14 days. To kind of help break the chain. One of the key takeaways of that has been that our testing rate is far higher than the state average. We are the highest in many ways in the number of tests conducted. We have also been able to a large extent, curtail the explosion. So, for example, our doubling rate today is about 37 days. That's good. That is a decent figure. What is happening is that we are seeing every other day some cases, for example, at present we have 48 active cases, which is doubling a fairly sustainable number in the sense of the public health, as you would know, and as other would know Jharkhand being a particularly remote location and a state, it has unique challenges when it comes to medical infrastructure. So any large spurt would lead to a collapse of health infrastructure. As of today, we have about 170 dedicated COVID beds in dedicated hospitals. Till the time we are under that radar we are very easily able to curtail it, when in our stage, in case we have exponential growth, then we can go up to about a 1000 beds, but after 1000 it'll have to be an emergency measure. We will have to get stadiums converted, what we are seeing in Delhi today.
Pritish: COVID has brought out some loopholes in the system. What would be your suggestions to the government?
Ray: You can always look back and keep revisiting decisions. I am sure you are aware of the case where a pilot had to land on the Hudson, and it became a major bookseller. One of the lines that I remember from that is he said that any mathematical model would have predicted the outcome that I did, but there was no mathematical model at that point. So in the same way when you look at COVID response, obviously there could have been other methods of responding whether it was migrant issue wheater it was the issue of lockdown timing, unlock down timing. Having said that. I think the way forward has to be like, how do we look at a strategy in which we have living with COVID as well as being able to mitigate the effects of COVID. While at the same time preventing our most vulnerable population which is plus 60s one of the things I think that is under talked about and that is a gut that I have as a practitioner, is that there definitely some role to play of maybe genetic factors, may be BCG vaccination factors maybe it's something else which has allowed for COVID to have a far larger number of asymptomatic cases in Ranchi, especially. And also there are far fewer super spreaders so to speak spreaders in Ranchi than in Italy or in Spain.
Pritish: you have been an IAS office of almost a decade how would you assess, the development of India is India shiny? Is digital India taken off what your assessment of the lasts ten years is?
Ray: I think India of 2010, 11, it was very different from India 2020. And when you say about the I.T evolution, I think it's less of that evolution and more of a work in progress. And it is progressing at a phenomenally fast pace. Development by itself is a tricky subject in some places it percolates faster for example if you looked at Bangalore 10 years ago and Bangalore today you would not be able to recognize the same town. If we were to look into certain pockets of rural Rachni, they might not resemble exactly what was ten years ago, but that is quite a change, but not at the same level. Having said that I'm hopeful about India, simply because there things that are happening which at one point time were thought to be impossible. For example, if I go to the hinterlands of Ranchi itself. People's aspirations have changed. The demographic profile also helps. We are a very young country, and I think that has also helped in the COVID situation. When you have people coming back as migrant labour, they themselves talk about how they don't mind not going back simply because when they had left that Ranchi that was a very different Ranchi what they had left. I think ten years there has been quantum progress, not arithmetic, but geometric progress and that what makes me really really hopeful.
Pritish: You're saying that the migrant workers who are coming back may potentially bring a revolution or a massive upliftment. We are always looking at the digital revolution, Paytm digital banks, but you also mentioned that there has been upliftment there has been betterment aspiration has grown in the hinterlands and the inner parts of the country. But has all of this technology actually percolated to these villages and gilaas?
Ray: the good thing about technology is that it has the power to leapfrog. For example, on Tuesday, I had gone to an area where there is hardly any roads. There was somebody who told me that he would WhatsApp me the problem. The good thing about technology it allows you to leapfrog and information revolution has percolated to almost every village across the country, not only in Rachni, not just in Jharkhand. There are now very, very few unconnected villages when I joined the service in 2013, I was supposed as subdivision magistrate in India's most left-wing extremists violent hit districts, Khunti. And I would often go to villages where there was no mobile internet, there was no mobile tower, but people had mobiles. Did they work? No, They worked for a very different reason, sources of entertainment, and this was way back in 2014, you had these little "Haats" like a farmer's market. Where you have solar panels attached battery chargers being sold because they are off-grid. And you had these entrepreneurs, so to speak who would go around the village charging 10 rupees for a movie download. This is way back in 2015 and today when I go to villages, I see young men and women, both getting information off the net.
Pritish: You mentioned the internet, mobile, WhatsApp has reached the innermost parts of the country. What hasn't reached what you want to happen or reach these people in the next ten years?
Ray: One of the greatest challenges that India faces today is malnutrition. Especially Rachni. The greatest asset that we have is the demographic base we have a young demographic, but a malnourished demographic dividend would not have its outcome. Secondly, the other thing that I see is that until we get into skill training in a big way, our education system needs to change.
I'm sure Pritish you realize that what we learned in class 12 is pretty much are A levels all are pretty much useless. I really don't see any use of having learnt why Shylock charged what he did- a pound of flesh. So we need to definitely have a major revamp in our skilling models. I think that is something that is happening, but it needs to happen faster and much more.
Pritish: Quickfire. So I'm gonna ask you four questions, and you just need to give me one word or one sentence responses. A book or a blog that has transformed the way you think?
Ray: The Anarchy
Pritish: Another country that you closely monitor whose development you think has been commendable.
Ray: Brazil much more closer model that we need to look at, whether it is some issues of democracy, to corruption, issues of education, to nutrition.
Pritish: Lucknow or Ranchi?
Ray: Lucknow any day
Pritish: if not an IAS officer, then what?
Ray: Academician. I was an academician before I took the exam, I would continue.
Pritish: Ray, it was exciting and thanks for your time.
Ray: Thank you so much Pritish for having me on board.