In a\ngeographically vast and demographically diverse society, it is an onerous task\nfor the state machinery to reach out to its citizens and enable them to avail\nits services. Even with its vast spectrum of services that the state offers and\nwrites down as law, with its limited manpower and reach, the onus of utilizing\nthem falls on the common folk. For those, who are in need of these services,\nmost are often poor unlettered rural folk unfamiliar and ill-equipped to\ninteract and make demands from the state. Even for availing the most basic of\nservices, like a voter card or a caste certificate the citizens often have to\ntravel long distances. And it is not just the geographical distance, but also\nthe difficulty for the common folk to access government officials. In most\ncases, an average citizen will find it difficult to get a government official\nto listen to him. So the inaccessibility of the state can be attributed to two reasons:\nfirstly, the physical distance of the government from the people for whom it\nmatters most and secondly, inaccessibility of the government officials. In\naddition to these is the complexity of government procedures through a complex\nnetwork of bureaucratic channels which the common folk find incomprehensible to\nnavigate through. Also, often being not literate enough these people find it a\nbarrier to understand the language of the state to access the state provided\nservices for their benefit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Such a\ntwo-faceted distance between the state and the society has created a void, thus\nallowing a group of non-state actors to populate it and act as a channel\nbetween the state and its citizens. As both Atul Kohli and Anirudh Krishna have\nfound in their respective works that both the state and political organizations\nhave been unable to cover the last mile. This has created the need for filling\nthe gap by mediators who cover the crucial void left by political parties and\nstate machinery and bring the state closer to the people. We know this group of\nactors as \u2018middlemen\u2019. One can find these middlemen in almost every government\noffice, from the revenue department offices to transport department offices,\nnegotiating with citizens and enabling them to avail services from taxes and\ndriving licenses to caste certificates. Places where there are no middlemen\nleave the void to be navigated by the citizens who are neither familiar with\nthe complexity of government procedures nor are often times literate enough to\nunderstand the complex bureaucratic language on letters and forms of the state\nadministration. These middlemen close the gap between the state and the\ncitizens and hold a very important place at the crucial position of \u2018last mile\nservice delivery\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Being at the\njuncture of a state-society relationship, these middlemen are held as\n\u2018important\u2019 people who can \u2018get things done\u2019. The importance these people enjoy\namongst those who see the state as a superior incomprehensible entity with\ncomplex networks of procedures and language is due to the fact that middlemen\nsimply do what our frontline bureaucracy fails to achieve. The middlemen are educated\nenough to traverse the administrative and legal networks of the state. They\nalso have connections to officials across departments owing to which they can overcome\nprocedural barriers easily on behalf of others. They are individuals amongst\nthe people who have grown up amongst them and is visible to them easily. He is,\nunlike a government official, a common individual who somehow has cracked the\ncomplexity of the state machinery and pervaded it and brought it closer to the\npeople. He is easily accessible, unlike an official who is urban literate and\nunfamiliar with the life and sufferings of the people. Even when the work gets\ndelayed, he can be called upon as he is a familiar figure and probably leaves\nin the same village or the neighbouring one, unlike someone from the\nbureaucracy who virtually has very little accountability to the people. Also,\nthe caste of the middleman does not matter as people across caste lines call\nupon him for favours. Thus, the middleman is a local leader (not necessarily in\nthe sense of a political leader) who grants favours to the people and acts a\nmedium of state-society interactions from enabling individuals to access state-provided\nlegal protection as social security and welfare to voicing concerns of\naccountability against corruption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Acting as a\nchannel brings personal benefits to the middleman and people around him. He\ncharges different prices for different services he facilitates access to. By\nleveraging his connections, and necessitated by his need for survival, he makes\na cut for all the officials at different levels of the administrative hierarchy\ninvolved in a particular service delivery. This cost, bore by the citizen,\noriginates at the failure of the state to reach out to the citizens and\nensuring ease of accessibility to citizens. \nBut it is not just corruption rooting out of the inefficiency of the\nstate. A wilful agreement on the part of the officials in the lower levels of\nthe executive to let middlemen thrive for a secondary source of income also\ncontributes to the sustenance of the middlemen. The middleman thus becomes important\nand his existence is sustained as both the state and society see the middleman\nas an indispensable part of a system where neither the state is capable to\ndeliver nor is willing to deliver except for the channels of a middleman.\nPersonnel at the lower levels of our administration see the middleman as the\nbest possible way to have secondary sources of income without directly asking\npeople for bribes to get their job done. Therefore, the officials do the job\nfor the middleman in return for their cut and also earns without directly\ngetting involved in extracting bribes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The middlemen\nthus give traction to voices that would otherwise be not heard owing to their\ndistance from the state that still exists. They enable thousands, if not\nmillions to avail social protection that are guaranteed as laws. They\nfacilitate connections with service providers to even the urban literate\nclasses who too have minimum interactions with the state and want to get past\nit its procedures with minimum hurdles. But the very existence of middlemen is\nproof of the fact that the Indian state has been a failure. And in a system\nwhere both the lower level service-providing class of the executive arm and the\nnumerically large distant poor rural citizens come together to sustain a system\nof demand for the services of a middleman, it will not be easy to root out. For\nthat would mean very new challenges for an ill equipped state as it has to\nreach out to its citizens like never before and bringing even the most distant\nones closer through newer governance mechanisms, while simultaneously keeping\nit lucrative and maintaining accountability for the lower levels of the\nbureaucracy to provide the services smoothly that it is meant to provide. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
(The above\narticle is based upon fieldwork that the author undertook in government offices\nin Bangalore Rural district as part of his academic requirements along with his\npeers).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The middlemen thus give traction to voices that would otherwise be not heard owing to their distance from the state that still exists. They enable thousands, if not millions to avail social protection that is guaranteed as laws.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":63855,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[122,92],"tags":[203,200,202,201],"class_list":["post-63854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-governance","category-social","tag-good-governance","tag-middlement","tag-public-services","tag-service-delivery"],"yoast_head":"\n