Money or Wealth: Where is Administrators’ Focus in Manipur

Writer – Amar Yumnam
In one of the routine morning messages for goodness of the day, I recently received a very interesting cartoon. In the cartoon, the person receiving vaccination asked of the Sister if he could be confident that he was 100% safe. The beauty lies in the response of the Sister: “People Wish You A Happy Married Life At The Time Of Marriage. It is similar.” There is no promise necessary when I claim that I did have a good laughter.
On the evening of the same day, I did read a headlines in the Imphal Times of an officer filing a legal case and claiming at the same time a substantial sum for allegations against him. The morning laughter and the lightness of the feelings of the day immediately got dead. Let me mention some things about Manipur before I continue further. First, there are development needs and necessary policy interventions demanding unavoidable attention sooner than later. Second, the governance lapses have been more frequent than successful scores in the interventions for development matters; please do not exercise on me the option of enquiring for the successful performances. Third, Manipur calls for performing leaders in varied sectors and particularly so in the present particular context. Fourth, there is immediacy for performance of successful interventions in the particular social situation and the absence of constitutional political administration by the public representatives. Given these and similar situations, the administrative – both in imagining and performing – responsibilities of the Bureaucrats and the Technocrats are very high and immediate in character.
Given these socio-politico-economic imperatives and the compulsive role of the Bureaucracy (though the term is Singular, the persons needed for Service are Plural and varied as the sectoral variations and socio-politico-economic intervention characteristics are), the saw of the legal news was very disappointing. What Manipur needs today is not giving attention to what anybody utters about or against self, but the social resumption of the development process. The news item immediately reminded of a book by Morgan Housel entitled The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons On Wealth, Greed, And Happiness; though the book was published in 2020, yet I read it only recently. Writing on America he writes on page 87 (let me take the privilege of a longish quote): “What has happened to our time….barely looks like progress. And a lot of the reason has to do with the kind of jobs more of us now have. John D. Rockefeller was one of the most successful businessmen of all time. He was also a recluse, spending most of his time by himself. He rarely spoke, deliberately making himself inaccessible and staying quiet when you caught his attention. A refinery worker who occasionally had Rockefeller’s ear once remarked: “He lets everybody else talk, while he sits back and says nothing.” When asked about his silence during meetings, Rockefeller often recited a poem:
A wise old owl, lived in an oak,
The more he saw the less he spoke,
The less he spoke, the more he heard,
Why aren’t we all like that wise old bird?
Rockefeller was a strange guy. But he figured out something that now applies to tens of millions of workers. Rockefeller’s job wasn’t to drill wells, load trains, or move barrels. It was to think and make good decisions. Rockefeller’s product – his deliverable – wasn’t what he did with his hands, or oven his words. It was what he figured out inside his head. So that’s where he spent most of his time and energy. Despite sitting quietly most of the day in what might have looked like free time or leisure hours to most people, he was constantly working in his mind, thinking problems through.”
We are indeed sure that today’s Manipur needs the values, the functioning, and the delivery assurances like Rockefeller did in his time. The developmental requirements of Manipur are now in both Qualitative and Quantitative dimensions. These multidimensional imperatives are very different from the rest of other regions of India both in Qualitative and Quantitative dimensions. This unavoidably implies a necessarily regional appreciation of the development issues, characteristics and still diversity in the composition of policy interventions in the regional context.
This is exactly here that the differential critical role of Professionals and Bureaucracy lies. While the political leaders might be very general in their approaches to understanding social realities and the needed policy imperatives, it is the Bureaucracy and the Professionals in the service of the government who should evolve a strategy to think and to evolve policies – policies which can serve both the Qualitative and the Quantitative roles for social advancement. Attending to what people talk about their selves should not carry more weight than the enhancing of public performance opportunities.