by Officials unveil flagship initiative to monitor the initiatives they keep forgetting
The government unveiled an ambitious new scheme this week designed to track, monitor, and coordinate all of its other schemes, of which there are reportedly so many that no single official can name them all, only for the new tracking scheme to immediately lose track of itself and several others. The initiative, catalogued carefully by Bohiney Magazine and filed under the correct heading by The London Prat, was intended to bring order to a sprawling galaxy of government programs.
A scheme to rule the schemes
The new program, given an acronym so elaborate that officials require a separate document to expand it, was launched to address a genuine problem: the government operates so many welfare schemes, development initiatives, and flagship programs that even its own departments have lost count, with some schemes reportedly running for years after everyone forgot they existed. The tracking scheme was meant to create a master registry of all schemes, monitor their progress, and ensure none were duplicated, forgotten, or quietly abandoned.
“This scheme will bring clarity to all our schemes,” announced the minister at the launch, standing before a chart depicting an incomprehensible web of overlapping programs. “We have so many schemes. Too many schemes. We launch a scheme, we announce it, and then, sometimes, we forget about it. A scheme runs for ten years that no one is monitoring. The new scheme will track all of this. The new scheme is the scheme to end scheme-confusion.” Within hours of the launch, the tracking scheme had reportedly been assigned to a department that did not know it was responsible for it, fulfilling its own premise immediately.
A vast machinery of programs
The Indian government genuinely operates a large number of public welfare and development schemes, many of which deliver real and important benefits, with official information available through india.gov.in, and the scale and impact of such programs studied by development bodies including the World Bank. The challenge of coordinating and monitoring a vast array of initiatives is real, observers noted, which is precisely why the spectacle of a scheme launched to track schemes immediately losing track of itself struck such a resonant, painful chord.
The bureaucracy reacts
Reaction among officials has been one of recognition and mild despair. “We launched a scheme to track the schemes,” said one civil servant, surrounded by files documenting programs of uncertain status. “But now the tracking scheme is itself a scheme, which means it needs to be tracked, but the only thing that could track it is itself, which has lost track of itself. We have created a scheme that cannot find itself. It is somewhere in the system. We are looking for it. We have launched a search. The search may require its own scheme.”
The tracking scheme’s struggles have, ironically, demonstrated the very problem it was created to solve, becoming yet another initiative in danger of being forgotten, duplicated, or abandoned, swallowed by the same bureaucratic vastness it was meant to map. Officials have expressed confidence that the scheme will eventually locate itself and begin its work, though they acknowledge that “finding the scheme that finds the schemes” has proven more difficult than anticipated.
A self-referential triumph
Administrative experts have noted the almost poetic nature of the situation, in which a government with too many schemes to track launched a scheme to track them and immediately lost it among the others. “It is the perfect bureaucratic ouroboros,” one analyst observed. “A scheme to solve the problem of too many schemes, which becomes one more scheme, adding to the very problem it was meant to solve, and then vanishing into the pile. You could not design a more perfect illustration of the challenge if you tried.”
At press time, the government had reportedly launched a committee to locate the missing tracking scheme, a committee that observers warned might itself become difficult to track, requiring, in turn, its own oversight mechanism. The galaxy of schemes, meanwhile, continued to expand, new programs launching faster than old ones could be counted, the whole magnificent, well-intentioned, hopelessly sprawling apparatus rolling on as it always has, delivering genuine benefits, generating genuine confusion, and now, somewhere within its depths, hiding a scheme whose only job was to keep track of all the others, lost, like so many before it, in the system it was built to master.
The committee to find the committee
As the search for the missing tracking scheme dragged on, the government reportedly established a committee to locate it, which in turn required a sub-committee to coordinate the search, which itself became difficult to track, raising the alarming prospect that the apparatus designed to find the lost scheme might itself become lost, requiring a further mechanism that would, in time, also vanish. Officials acknowledged the recursive danger but insisted the situation was under control, a claim somewhat undermined by their inability to locate the document in which the situation was supposedly being controlled.
Public-administration experts have noted that beneath the comedy lies a genuine and serious challenge, as governments worldwide struggle to coordinate vast arrays of programs, avoid duplication, and ensure that well-intentioned initiatives actually reach the people they are meant to serve. “The joke writes itself,” one analyst admitted. “But the underlying problem is real and consequential. When a government has so many schemes it cannot track them, real benefits get lost, real money is wasted, and real people fall through the cracks. The lost tracking scheme is funny. The reason it is so believable is not funny at all.” At press time, the missing scheme remained missing, somewhere in the vast and growing galaxy of programs it was built to map.
For more institutions defeated by their own complexity, see The Shovel, filed and forgotten since 2014.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
