Add to these India’s armed forces of a million-plus and 1.4 million in the railways. It is this large group that is administering state services for India’s citizens.
This column, focused on administrative state capacity, is the fourth in a series on the ‘Quantity to Quality’ transformation that India needs to reach upper middle-income status and beyond.
As a state matures, and its economy develops, the expectations of its citizenry also evolve. For India, this is happening at a time when the world is changing at warp speed on aspirations, digitization, social media, artificial intelligence, molecular biology and much else.
This rapid change in the environment and expectations creates an enormous burden on the state to induct the right personnel who can adapt to these changes and make and interpret policies that reflect the times.
Of course, with India’s administrative group representing about 3% of the country’s population, all the building-block ideas covered in earlier columns in this series—a good public health system, effective primary and middle school education and meaningful pathways to professional development and specialization—are a prerequisite.
Beyond these fundamentals, an effective organization will have to focus on matching the right government worker to the right job, continually training the government worker (with appropriate credentials awarded for skills) and, based on results, rewarding this employee with an upwardly mobile career path.
Conversely, from the point of view of each government system, goals need to be defined, progress tracked and outcomes measured in terms of time, money spent and effectiveness.
Fortunately, this seemingly impossible task is imaginable using the power of technology. A group of technocrats, including Santhosh Mathew, a former Indian Administrative Service officer, and others are working on just such an idea of a goal-oriented human-resource management system that uses the power of technology to sharpen each step of the process, matching goals to outcomes for each system as a whole and for each worker involved in that system.
The central government has launched a version of this in a programme called Mission Karmayogi. Other versions of this programme have been co-opted by a few states.
A technology platform can enable improvements in the system. Also needed is strong political will for meaningful financial devolution and political decentralization.
One critical determinant of improved government-service delivery is a reduction in the geographical distance between an activity and its funding, measurement and audit.
Part IX and IXA of the Indian Constitution deal with political and financial decentralization of authority to local bodies at rural and urban levels.
In the three decades since the promulgation of the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution that required greater decentralization to rural and urban local bodies, the progress has been slow and appears to have slowed even more in recent years.
While elections have generally been held for these bodies, political and financial decentralization has not really taken place, with money and power still concentrated at the Union and state levels.
As the old saying goes, ‘Devolution is a great idea so long as it stops at my level.’ While the constitutionally mandated Finance Commission at the central level has worked well, similarly mandated State Finance Commissions (SFCs) have worked very poorly. SFCs have not always been constituted at the designated time, and once constituted, their recommendations have been ignored.
A recent book by Karthik Muralidharan of the University of California San Diego titled Accelerating India’s Development provides an excellent frame to think about the practical issues of implementing change.
With rigorous analysis and persuasive logic, Muralidharan lays the emphasis for accelerating India’s development at the state level and at the level of local bodies, arguing that only those ideas that benefit from economies of scale should be centralized.
He laments the fact that the allocation of human resources and money at the most decentralized levels in India is among the lowest in the world.
The Second Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC) made some excellent points related to organizing administrative activities based on the principle of subsidiarity, which entails that what can best be done at local government levels not be centralized at higher levels.
The ARC makes a persuasive argument for the promulgation of framework regulation that makes devolution of functions and finance mandatory rather than discretionary.
Giving effective voice to local government to negotiate with state governments is an imperative not only from a democratic point of view, but also from a functional effectiveness perspective. No amount of training or technology can substitute for effective decentralization reform based on the principle of subsidiarity.
P.S: “Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom. But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual,” said Mahatma Gandhi.