What Dhulia's 1982 scam revealed about Bhatia's early career

In 1982, a district Collector in Dhulia, in inland Maharashtra, found irregularities in the wage payment registers of the state’s Employment Guarantee Scheme. A programme that put the rural poor to work digging roads, canals, and tanks in exchange for daily wages, the Employment Guarantee Scheme was one of the largest anti-poverty schemes in the country at the time.

A graduate of St. Stephen’s College with a master’s degree from Cambridge’s Peterhouse, Arun Bhatia was barely a decade into his civil service career in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) when he uncovered his first corruption expose. Twenty-six years later, Bhatia left the civil service for a political career, but by then he had been transferred twenty-six times. By his own account and one instance examined by a court, each move followed a corruption exposed by him.

As the Collector of Bombay, he uncovered illegal construction by the city’s land mafia and irregularities in the enforcement of the Urban Land Ceiling Act. The expose implicated officers senior to him within his own service. In 1999, as Commissioner of the Pune Municipal Corporation, he ordered physical audits of municipal tenders, suspended officials and filed police complaints over irregularities from school uniform procurement to road-specification records. He also pursued a case against the sitting Chief Secretary of Maharashtra, the most senior officer in his own department, over allegations in road contracts. He was subsequently transferred. Citizens filed a PIL (public interest litigation, asking the court to intervene on a matter of public interest) challenging the reassignment order.

The matter appeared before the Bombay High Court as a Writ Petition. On 13th April 1999, the Chief Justice’s bench ruled that the transfer was invalid. The Chief Justice observed that “the order defies all logic and any moral standard”, adding that honesty deserved a pat on the back rather than punishment at a time when corruption was at its peak. The transfer was “like punishment” and was thus reversed by the court. This is one of the few recorded instances when the unofficial tradition of reassignment of civil servants as a consequence of a corruption expose has been challenged by another pillar of the state and reversed.

However, this did not change the broader and widespread pattern of civil servants being reassigned. As noted earlier, Bhatia himself has been transferred a total of 26 times in his 26-year career in civil service.

Bhatia also went on to take up United Nations assignments in rural development across Asia for roughly eight years. Spanning the Maldives, Bangladesh, Laos, and Myanmar, his work comprised International Fund for Agricultural Development-funded credit and banking projects, post-disaster rural assistance, and project design.

In 2024, discussing the arrest of IAS probationer Puja Khedkar over fabricated disability and caste certificates on a television panel, Bhatia said the IAS was “one of the most corrupt organisations” in the country. Speaking of his own career, he said, “Many were punished. Unfortunately, many were protected.”

Bhatia’s quote is evidence of the gap between what the institution the IAS is designed to be and what it actually is. On paper, the service is close to Max Weber’s model of rational-legal bureaucracy, with entry by competitive examination and postings and transfers governed by written service rules. Corruption is a violation of its design and correctable through inquiry. However, the reality is evidence of the inverse. Reassignment is a marker of integrity in the service because it is a consequence of challenging and questioning inconsistencies and irregularities in the system. This holds not only for Bhatia but across the bureaucratic system. Roopa Moudgil, an IPS officer a generation after Bhatia, built a reputation for not backing down in the face of political pressure in the line of duty and subsequently saw over forty transfers in her career. This system and tradition of protection and loyalty between the bureaucracy and political authority, which fosters corruption, is what Weber calls patrimonial authority, authority that runs on personal relationships rather than the office itself.

Bhatia left the IAS to contest in Pune’s 2004 Lok Sabha seat as an independent, drawing more than 60,000 votes without organisational backing and founded the People’s Guardian Party in January 2009. As Bhatia began his political career, IPS officer Roopa Moudgil began her journey of exposing corruption and clashes with political power. She said that “the system discredits the whistle-blower to maintain status quo.”

We can read Bhatia’s candour as a result of his disengagement from the civil service. He has the freedom to give his opinion freely now that he is no longer part of the institution. But Bhatia was not waiting for this freedom to point out the issues with the institution. His actions during his three-decade-long career in the civil service also express the same reality. However, the larger and looming question of whether the actions and opinions of individual civil servants (in service or retired) can shift and alter the embedded tradition of corrupt reciprocity within the bureaucracy and between the bureaucracy and political power remains.

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