Millions of Indians rely on the struggling national transporter and any solution to prioritise safety must be welcomed. Discovering a problem before it becomes an accident is infinitely preferable to the other way round. (Representational Image/Amit Mehra/File)
The 13 lakh employees of the Indian Railways will soon have a platform to make anonymous disclosures about safety lapses. On a website being developed by the Centre for Railway Information System (CRIS), workers needn’t reveal their identities while providing information — be it about an engineer skipping maintenance protocol or a gateman sleeping on duty (The Indian Express, February 5, 2018). This measure follows a series of derailments in 2016-17 and the Utkal Express accident that killed over 20 people in Uttar Pradesh last year.
Millions of Indians rely on the struggling national transporter and any solution to prioritise safety must be welcomed. Discovering a problem before it becomes an accident is infinitely preferable to the other way round. Employees have no choice but to accept higher levels of scrutiny when their work involves national security and public interest. Air India also follows a similar universal reporting mechanism. It is worth noting though that last year, The Economic Times reported the Indian Railways has a shortage of over two lakh employees, of which more than half the vacancies were in the safety category. It is safe to assume, the employees doubling up for this shortfall are savagely overworked. In addition to hideous working conditions, now they must watch out for their colleagues turned frenemies, who hold immense power with this authorised sanction to out misconduct.
These ethical dilemmas on how to react to somebody else’ wrongdoings persist at every stage of life. It begins in the classroom — when the kid in front of you is copying answers from another kid during an examination. Since your own marks will remain unchanged, are you better off ignoring it, though that kid may, aggravatingly enough, score more without having put in the work. As adults, do you tell friends if you know their spouses are cheating on them or recall, selfishly perhaps, Shakespeare’s innate wisdom from Henry IV: don’t shoot the messenger.
In life, it doesn’t generally pay to be the bearer of bad news, even if you are entitled to give it anonymously. Similarly, a railway employee cannot really blame a colleague for a lapse knowing fully well he could have made exactly the same mistake since they are both working under extreme duress. There is a contradiction in the same person exposing a wrongdoing and being in a position to foster it. According to many reports, maintenance of India’s railway tracks have been abysmal for years because of severe financial constraints. Blame cannot fall on individuals when catastrophes happen, because the system is flawed at so many levels.
In a sense, whistleblowing can seem almost heroic. Yet many shades of grey exist between these seemingly black-and-white questions in a world that has decided there can be no moral absolutes. The question needs to be asked if CRIS’ plan to pit employees against each other to improve safety isn’t a dangerous recipe for chaos. The idea, that giving individuals the freedom to hurl accusations at each other will act as a deterrent seems ambitious. Given the state of crisis the organisation is in, clearly the employees have a lot to complain about. When people have the power of anonymity, there’s no way of knowing when personal equations come into play. Distinguishing genuine blame from malicious is next to impossible. One can only wonder if people can actually work and be productive in such a hostile atmosphere, where they’re expected to act as watchdogs over each other. All surveys on office culture suggest trust improves performance and suspicion mars it.
Post Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, there has been a positive shift in attitudes towards whistleblowing, yet it carries a strong negative connotation. Nobody likes a snitch. In India, especially, whistleblowers tend to end up badly. Satyendra Dubey, murdered for exposing corruption, and Shanmugam Manjunath, killed for sealing a petrol pump selling adulterated fuel, have gone down in history as examples of the self-sacrifice sometimes required to adhere to principles. Of course, we have a moral obligation to prevent serious harm to others but it’s fair to act only after weighing the costs to ourselves.