Building a world-class civil service for twenty-first century India

摘要

The post independence transformation of India has been a journey that began with genuine aspirations of self determination, propelled by hopes of redeeming the self esteem of a nation and its people from over two centuries of imperial subjugation. The chosen path of self redemption and economic self sufficiency revealed its initial directions and political leanings in the form of the First Five Year Plan of 1950, a plan that sat well with the Bombay Plan of 1944–45, especially with regard to the role that the state was envisaged to play in the development of the nation. The ensuing Nehruvian era witnessed a slow yet firm evolution of an increasingly interventionist state. It was also the era that witnessed a steady entrenchment of the Indian administrative bureaucracy, the primary institutional mechanism for implementation of the government’s welfare and developmental policies. The post independence Indian Administrative Service, for reasons of administrative continuity and stability, continued to be the erstwhile Indian Civil Service (ICS) of the British Raj, with little but the name changed. While the ICS of the British Raj was pronounced ‘Neither Indian, nor Civil, nor Service’.1 even today, more than half a century since then, many debates and several reforms commissions down the line, the present administrative service of India is still ranked low among its peers and the rest of the world.2 Today India is the world’s largest democracy and is also fast emerging as one of the largest economies. It is imperative at this juncture to purge the bottlenecks in public service delivery, the road-blocks to inclusive growth and the lethargy of a corrupt bureaucracy. The author of this book, S.K. Das, a retired civil servant himself, has written prolifically on this vital topic of Indian civil services reforms. Building a World-Class Civil Service for Twenty-First Century India is his fourth book3 on the theme of the Indian civil services, their nature and the process of reformative transformation. The book presents a well researched collection of facts and ideas, which the author optimistically hopes will lead to the transformation of the Indian civil services to the‘world-class’ standard befitting an emerging global player. The book, following a factual description of the state of the civil services in the first section, is organised in three subsequent sections, each one dwelling on the three salient dimensions of institutional, organisational and legal/ethical frameworks of analysis. A comparative analysis along these frameworks forms the primary basis for the bulk of author’s narrative, arguments and prescriptions in the book.