An Absurdist Cascade, Deconstructing the Parody of Endless Bureaucratic Accountability

An Absurdist Cascade, Deconstructing the Parody of Endless Bureaucratic Accountability

The provided text, attributed to Satish Deshpande, is not a conventional news article, but a masterful piece of satire and bureaucratic absurdism. Through its repetitive, escalating structure, it lampoons a central, frustrating tendency in modern governance: the belief that any societal problem can be solved by the creation of a new regulation, a new reporting mechanism, or a new layer of accountability, often administered by a body whose core function is being neglected. While framed around the University Grants Commission (UGC), the text quickly spirals into a hilarious and dark critique of regulatory overreach, mission creep, and the paradox of making things visible only to obscure the original purpose. This “current affair” is, in fact, a timeless commentary on the nature of power, procedure, and institutional decay, using humor to expose a very real syndrome in Indian and global administration.

The Anatomy of the Absurd: From Course Guides to the Forest Department

The genius of the text lies in its structure. It begins with a plausible, if concerning, premise: “New UGC regulations have made it difficult for students to access information about their courses.” This immediately establishes a core failure—the regulator impeding the very constituency it is meant to serve. It then follows with another neutral point about plagiarism detection. So far, so typical.

Then, the satire begins its exponential march. The phrase “The UGC has also taken steps to increase the accountability of its X” becomes a relentless refrain. The list of “X” starts internally—staff, students, parents—then expands beyond any rational jurisdiction: universities, institutions, government, society, media, judiciary, police. It has already crossed into the ridiculous, but the author pushes further into the surreal: forest department, fisheries, tourism, agriculture, industry, banking, insurance, real estate, hospitality, entertainment, sports, culture. The culmination touches every facet of human existence: environment, health, education (again), infrastructure, transportation, communication, energy, water, food, waste management, recycling.

This is not an error; it is the point. The piece mimics the logic of a bureaucracy that, having mastered the form of accountability (complaints filed, disciplinary actions taken), has completely lost sight of its substance and boundary. The UGC, tasked with overseeing higher education, has—in this fictional universe—become a panopticon for all of society. The text holds up a mirror to a world where every institution, faced with a crisis of core competence, responds by expanding its mandate for oversight rather than fixing its foundational flaws.

The Core Critique: When Process Obscures Purpose

Beneath the humor lies a sharp critique of several interconnected phenomena:

1. Regulatory Mission Creep: This is the process by which an agency gradually expands its scope beyond its original purpose. The satire exaggerates this to the extreme, asking: If the UGC can’t ensure easy course access for students, what business does it have regulating fisheries? The joke exposes how diffused accountability often becomes a substitute for focused competence.

2. The “Accountability” Trap: The text weaponizes the buzzword “accountability.” In contemporary governance, “increasing accountability” is an unquestioned good. But here, it is rendered meaningless through repetition and misapplication. It suggests a world where the performance of accountability (having a system for complaints) is valued over the outcome of accountability (better education). It’s a system busy filing complaints against the forest department while the library has no books.

3. The Visibility Paradox: The subtitle, “make the invisible visible,” is deeply ironic. The new regulations, in this satire, make everything “visible” to the UGC’s complaint department, but in doing so, they make the actual, essential things—clear course information, pedagogical quality—even more invisible, buried under procedural sludge. It’s a critique of audit culture, where the metric (number of disciplinary actions) becomes the goal, distorting the original mission.

4. The Blame-Deflection Framework: By creating a complaint mechanism against everyone—from students and parents to “society” and “the judiciary”—the satirical UGC creates a perfect system for deflecting blame. Any failure can now be attributed to the unaccountability of “media,” “police,” or “agriculture.” It is the ultimate bureaucratic survival technique: when you are responsible for everything, you are responsible for nothing.

Satire as a Reflection of Real Anxieties

While exaggerated, this satire resonates because it amplifies real trends:

• The UGC’s Contradictions: The real UGC has often been criticized for micromanaging universities with stringent, one-size-fits-all regulations (on curriculum, faculty recruitment, infrastructure) while failing to curb deep-seated issues like the proliferation of substandard private colleges or endemic political interference in universities. The satire captures this spirit of misplaced priorities.

• The Global Audit Society: Sociologists like Michael Power have written about the “Audit Society,” where practices of financial auditing have spread to all aspects of public and professional life, prioritizing measurable indicators over qualitative judgment. The satire is a direct parody of this world.

• India’s Bureaucratic Legacy: India’s colonial-era bureaucracy was built on control and reporting. The post-independence state often added new regulatory layers without removing old ones. The text’s escalating list humorously reflects a citizen’s lived experience of dealing with overlapping, often uncoordinated authorities for every aspect of life.

The Absurd as a Political and Philosophical Tool

This piece operates in the tradition of writers like Franz Kafka (“The Castle,” “The Trial”) and George Orwell, who used absurd bureaucratic scenarios to explore alienation and powerlessness. Kafka’s protagonists face opaque, endless procedures; here, the UGC itself has become a Kafkaesque institution, generating procedure for procedure’s sake.

It also functions as Menippean satire—a form that attacks mental attitudes rather than specific individuals, using a chaotic structure to mirror a disordered world. The author isn’t just criticizing the UGC; they are criticizing a mindset: the technocratic, hyper-rationalist belief that society can be perfected through the correct configuration of rules and grievances.

A Warning Against Instrumental Reason Run Amok

At its philosophical core, the text is a warning about the tyranny of instrumental reason—the focus on efficiency and means at the expense of ends and values. The satirical UGC is supremely “rational” in its systems for logging complaints. But it is utterly irrational in its purpose. It has forgotten that its reason for existence is the nurturing of knowledge and the student’s intellectual journey, not the maintenance of a universal grievance register.

This is profoundly relevant today. We see this in education systems worldwide that prioritize standardized testing over learning, in corporations that focus on ESG metrics over substantive environmental or social change, and in governments that prioritize press releases about new initiatives over the dull, hard work of implementation. The satire screams: Beware when the map of accountability becomes so detailed that it obscures the territory of reality.

Conclusion: The Unfinished Sentence and the Infinite Regress

Significantly, the text ends abruptly: “The UGC has also taken steps to increase the accountability of its”. The sentence is unfinished, implying the list is infinite. This is the perfect ending. It suggests a process with no logical end, a bureaucracy expanding to fill all available conceptual space until it consumes itself. There is no final accountability, only an endless regress of blame.

In the end, “New UGC regulations make the invisible visible” is a tragicomic slogan for our age. It reminds us that in our quest to measure, regulate, and hold accountable, we risk creating systems so complex and far-reaching that they render the original, humane goals invisible. The real current affair is not the fictional UGC regulations, but our ongoing struggle to build institutions that are truly accountable to their purpose, not just to their own procedural rituals. Satire, as this brilliant piece demonstrates, is sometimes the most visible tool for examining the invisible flaws in our foundations.

Q&A: Delving Deeper into the Satire and its Real-World Parallels

Q1: Beyond the UGC, what are some real-world examples of “regulatory mission creep” or “accountability theatre” in India that this satire mirrors?
A1: The satire mirrors numerous real instances:

• The RBI and Inflation: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), with its primary mandate of monetary stability, has at times been publicly tasked by political actors with managing currency exchange rates, fueling growth, and even ensuring loan waivers for farmers—objectives that can conflict with inflation control.

• The Election Commission (EC): While its core function is conducting free & fair elections, it has increasingly been drawn into regulating political speech, enforcing a model code of conduct that judges the morality of campaigns, and even mandating disclosures unrelated to electoral integrity, leading to debates about overreach.

• Environmental Clearance Processes: The complex, multi-layered environmental clearance system is often criticized for being a procedural labyrinth (creating “visibility” of steps) that delays projects for years, while failing to ensure effective, on-ground environmental protection (the invisible substance). It becomes a “tick-box” accountability.

• University Teachers & Non-Academic Duties: Professors at public universities frequently report being burdened with endless committee work, election duty, and administrative compliance reporting (all forms of “accountability” performance), which directly steals time from their core duties of teaching and research.

Q2: The satire ends mid-sentence. What is the philosophical and rhetorical effect of this unfinished ending?
A2: The unfinished ending is a masterstroke. Philosophically, it represents infinite regress and the inexhaustible nature of bureaucratic expansion. There is no logical stopping point once an institution abandons its raison d’être and embraces process as its product. Rhetorically, it creates a jarring, open-ended feeling in the reader. It denies closure, mimicking the citizen’s experience of never truly resolving an issue with a bureaucracy—there is always another form, another committee, another appeal. It suggests the text itself could go on forever, just like the UGC’s new mandate, leaving the reader in a state of absurd exhaustion that mirrors the subject matter. It’s a silent scream into the void of administration.

Q3: The author uses a flat, repetitive, bureaucratic tone. How does this stylistic choice enhance the satire compared to using a more openly critical or humorous voice?
A3: The deadpan, bureaucratic tone is essential. It employs imitation as critique. By mimicking the exact language of official reports, press releases, and government circulars (“has taken steps to,” “increased the number of complaints that can be filed”), the satire achieves verisimilitude, making the absurdity more potent because it sounds real. An openly sneering tone would allow the reader to distance themselves. This flat tone forces the reader to engage with the illogic on its own terms, experiencing the numbness of bureaucratic thinking. The humor arises not from the author’s commentary, but from the reader’s dawning realization of the gap between the calm procedural language and the insane content. It is the comedy of the mundane pushed into the surreal.

Q4: If we treat the article as a serious proposal (however impossible), what would be the practical and societal consequences of a single body like the UGC attempting to hold “society,” “the judiciary,” and “the media” accountable?
A4: Treating it seriously reveals a dystopia:

• Totalitarian Overreach: It would constitute a single, unaccountable super-regulator, effectively a tool for total state control. The UGC would become more powerful than the judiciary (which it is “holding accountable”) and the legislature, destroying the separation of powers.

• Paralysis of All Systems: Every sector (fisheries, banking, media) would be subject to the UGC’s educational-sector-oriented complaint procedures, crippling their independent functioning with irrelevant compliance demands.

• The End of Civil Society: By holding “society” accountable, it criminalizes dissent and informal social norms, replacing them with state-mandated codes of conduct. Social trust would evaporate, replaced by fear of grievance filings.

• Information Collapse: Holding the “media” accountable in this way would be formal censorship, destroying press freedom and creating a propaganda arm of the education regulator.
  In short, it would be the end of a pluralistic, democratic society, replaced by a monolithic, absurd, and tyrannical administrative regime.

Q5: In a constructive response to the issues raised by the satire, what should a genuine reform of an institution like the UGC focus on, to avoid the pitfalls of “accountability theatre”?
A5: Genuine reform must recenter purpose and empower agency:

1. Shift from Input-Control to Outcome-Oriented Stewardship: Move away from micromanaging inputs (syllabus details, building specs) to fostering and measuring broad outcomes (graduate employability, research impact, student satisfaction). Be a facilitator, not an inspector.

2. Promote Institutional Autonomy with Transparent Accountability: Grant universities significant autonomy in academic and administrative matters. Hold them accountable through transparent disclosure (e.g., all curricula, budgets, faculty CVs, placement data online) and robust peer review, not pre-approvals.

3. Simplify and Decentralize: Radically prune the rulebook. Devolve most regulatory functions to empowered, independent boards at the university or state level. The UGC should set broad standards and act as a resource center.

4. Protect the Core Transaction: Every new rule should be stress-tested against one question: Does this make the primary relationship between teacher and student more fruitful, or does it add friction? If it’s the latter, it should be discarded.

5. Create Reciprocal Accountability: The UGC itself should be subject to clear, public performance metrics (e.g., reduction in student grievance redressal time, diversity indices in funded research) reviewed by an independent body including students and faculty. True accountability must flow both ways.