Context: The use of social media is gradually getting institutionalised in many Westminster system-based countries but it has remained largely unaddressed in Indian bureaucratic response.

• This article highlights that If civil servants don’t use social media appropriately, their role as independent advisers stands threatened.

Need

• The biggest challenge today to Indian bureaucracy is the shift from desk to digital. 
• This shift is not limited to a transition towards e-office and e-governance, but includes the organisational and bureaucratic response to digital spaces, especially the use of social media. 
• The focus has been mostly on the former, while the latter has remained largely unaddressed.

To use or not to use social media

• It is true that many civil servants have become accessible to the common people and public service delivery issues have been resolved through the use of social media. 
• There are two opinions on the use of social media by civil servants. 

1) Use in official capacity

• It created a positive outlook towards an institution long perceived as opaque and inaccessible. 
• It has increased awareness among people about government policies and programmes.
• It provides an opportunity to bureaucrats to shape the public discourse and engage with the public while being politically neutral. 

2) Use in Anonymity 

• Anonymity has been a hallmark of Westminster bureaucracies, including in India. 
• The use of social media is gradually getting institutionalised in many Westminster system-based countries. 
• During the Brexit debate in the U.K., many civil servants shaped public debate through the use of social media even while remaining politically neutral. 
• But in India, civil servants haven’t reflected on this aspect of digital bureaucracy.
• Because anonymity and opaqueness have already been watered down through the Right to Information Act of 2005. But they continue to be prominent features.

Key Challenges to Anonymity

• There is a basic contradiction in remaining habitually anonymous while governance in public is now the new normal. 
• Further, values are becoming more dominant than facts in public policymaking. 
• And both values and facts are getting reshaped due to fake news and systematic propaganda within public policy circles as well. 
• In such a scenario, the bureaucracy, which is expected to be the epitome of public values and a storehouse of facts, shouldn’t be expected to govern in private.

Accessibility and accountability

• In India, the role of social media in bureaucracy has taken a different direction like it is getting used by civil servants for self-promotion. 
• Through their selective posts and promotion of these posts by their social media fans, civil servants create a narrative of their performance. All this is justified in the name of accessibility and accountability. 
• There is a wrong notion getting entrenched in the public consciousness that social media is the way to access civil servants and make them accountable. 
• Social media may have improved accessibility and accountability, but it is important to note that civil servants are at an advantage to share the information they want and respond to those they want. 
• Social media accountability is no alternative to institutional and citizen-centric accountability. It is, in fact, partly unethical to use social media during office hours and justify it when some people who have travelled long distances are waiting outside the office. 

Road Ahead

• Bureaucracy is characterised by hierarchy, formal relationships and standard procedures, social media is identified by openness, transparency and flexibility while as an organisational form, the bureaucracy is incompatible with social media.
• Further, it is not a formal set-up where accessibility and accountability are based on uniformity of treatment. Bureaucrats should use social media to improve public policies. If they don’t use social media appropriately, their role as independent advisers stands threatened.