“Just reform the bureaucracy” – this advice to India by GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt is echoed across the world. Why administrative reforms haven’t taken place, best intents notwithstanding, requires a nuanced understanding. Global experience suggests administrative reforms need to be undertaken within the first 100 days of a new government coming to office, else the system takes over the government – the will to change is dwarfed by the logic of continuity.
Nowhere in the world have substantive administrative reforms been successful if not directly supervised by the political leader of the country. Successful administrative reforms are by definition transformational; there are no worthwhile examples of meaningful incremental administrative reforms.
Administrative reforms don’t happen when entrusted to the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy has to be kept at arm’s length and prevailed upon. These are cardinal rules; India is past the expiry date of the first 100 days, but it may still want to sail ahead.
The imperatives for administrative reforms in India are more fundamental than the leaking bucket and dilapidated administrative framework. First, in a historical oversight, India continued with the administrative framework of the British. This system was designed to inhibit the native, chain initiative and enterprise and enable a select few to rule the multitudes. These objectives have been faithfully served by the legacy framework even 68 years after the departure of colonial masters.
Post- the reforms of 1991, the framework designed to control and regulate has become anachronistic in the exercise of freedom, which is intrinsic to the market. As a participant in the global economy, either India rewrites its administrative system to compete with the best investment destinations of the world or perishes, for nothing except competitive advantage matters to the investment community. The way ahead will require a comprehensive roadmap as well as a strategy to pierce the chakravyuha, but a few principles may be useful reference points. At a philosophical level we need to adopt a trust based system with implicit faith in the citizen. Filling forms, providing attested documents, undergoing verification and awaiting decisions by higher ups are all instruments of an alien administration to disempower and dispirit the individual.
Government must take the word of the citizen at face value and devise a system to take care of exceptions without impeding the quest of the rest.
A second beacon for administrative reforms should be ending the dichotomy between government and national interest, again a colonial legacy. Basically government should stop acting in its own interest and should work in national interest which includes the interests of private individuals and the private sector.
The success of Japan, Korea and Singapore came from government deciding that its main role is to support and facilitate enterprise, be it individual or corporate. This is both an issue of mindset/ideology as well as a systemic issue of a very fundamental kind that requires recasting the administrative mould, not simply reshaping the existing one.
Finally, the government and technology intersect needs to be calibrated. Just about all our IT-based systems have merely computerised physical processes with, at best, marginal efficiency and transparency gains.
India is ready to transit from the physical to the virtual world like no other country. The almost ubiquitous access to mobile telephony can connect an individual to a service provider, the electronic bank account can be used to make payment when required and the Aadhaar card authenticates the individual online. Given that all these three components are approaching the one billion mark, such a proposition is neither esoteric nor futuristic – except to a mindset and system steeped in the past.
