Recharging Indian Bureaucracy

Failure of bureaucracy has prompted many efforts at reforming it. But administrative reform has failed in many developing countries, including India, for a variety of reasons. The costs of the bureaucracy’s malfunctioning are huge. Any attempt to recharge the Indian bureaucracy would need an examination of its design flaws. The first design flaw is a merit system that does not select for needed administrative capabilities. Second, short uncertain terms of members of the elite services. Third, overloading and centralization. Fourth, a monolithic state. Successful recharging of administration in Britain, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand, etc. indicate that a large part of the state needs to be broken up into semi-autonomous executive agencies. These need to have competitively selected heads on fixed tenures who operate autonomously within the constraints of an MoU with the government. The process adopted in Britain to set up and run executive agencies is described, and example of Passport Agency is given to illustrate how a government body may get transformed after its conversion into an executive agency. The contrasting performance after liberalization of India’s central government public enterprises, whose management structure resembles executive agencies, and the states-owned public enterprises with politician chairpersons and IAS managing directors on short, uncertain tenures supports fragmentation of the bulk of the Indian state into executive agencies for revitalizing administration.