Indian Bureaucracy: Maladies and Remedies

India’s governance structure a throwback to the Raj days has to meet the challenges of lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and empowering them as citizens of a democratic polity. The development and welfare orientation at the normative level in India does not get translated too well in positive terms into actual results of a progressive and just society. More and better plans are constantly drawn up but the bureaucracy’s capacity to deliver never worth bragging about so far as development is concerned has noticeably declined over the years. Political masters and the civil service elite often resort to collusion and connivance to use public office for private gain, thwarting all good intentions. Corruption and inefficiency, combined with callousness in dealing with the public, certainly are very serious problems. However, we really ought to be looking more closely at fundamental, systemic problems in administration. Our basic civil service structure at the All-India level the focus of this book suffers from several maladies, including: Lack of specialization and discrimination against specialists; insularity; lack of accountability; unsuitable recruitment and testing procedures; and faulty personnel management. That the country persists in having such administrative setup in this day and age is nothing short of tragic. The situation is so bad that tinkering with the administrative structure even overhauling it will not to do much good. The need clearly is to reform the system drastically, to re-engineer it, so as to have competency technical and otherwise and professionalism, accountability and transparency, and responsiveness and civility; let us make our civil servants civil and servants of the people. After all, aren’t these the imperatives of democratic governance within the overall goal of achieving rapid economic and social progress?