Strengthen India by Strengthening its Governmental Institutions

Recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai demonstrate yet another example of the weakness of the Indian governments. Rather than turning our anger at politicians and bureaucrats for being incompetent as usual, as Indians, we owe it to ourselves to think about the underlying causes behind widespread incompetence across Indian government systems.

Incompetent politicians, bureaucrats and slow judiciary are just symptoms of a sickness. The actual cause of the symptom is poor design of government institutions where incompetence breeds and allowed to flourish.

I hope it is obvious to everyone that for a country as big as India, a few good politicians or bureaucrats cannot do much of anything. What is absolutely necessary for lasting positive change is strong intelligently designed governmental institutions that can harness energies of thousands of Indians and coherently work together to effectively tackle the changing challenges facing the nation.

Most of Indian government institutions are inherited from the British Raj. Starting with our parliamentary democracy to various ministerial department and bureaucratic systems such as Indian Administrative Service are rooted in the British Raj. British intent in creating such institution was to run India with an Iron hand, not with quality. Unfortunately, we have failed to adjust these colonial era institutions to the new century and have it work for better serve the rising aspirations of a billion + citizens.

In surface, India’s institutional design is in par with any other modern developed countries but why is it not effective to address the current challenges?

Generally speaking, Ineffective feedback dynamics between the people and the politicians is the underlying problem within our democratic institutional framework. Sadly the bottom line that we see again and again is that the peoples demands/needs are not met by their representatives. The long five year between elections cripples peoples grip over the representatives and the bureaucracy. In American system, the lowest legislative bodies of local, state and federal government have only 2 year terms. This means a few months after election, they need to be back on election mode and start begging for mercy of the voters. The short terms will keep the legislators on tow and force them to be very responsive to the voters needs.

Since having a stable executive branch in the central and state governments is equally important, a good approach for Indian parliamentary system would be to have Rajya Saba MPs elected directly by the people on a shorter cycle (2 yr) and give Rajya saba more oversight powers over the cabinet.

To its credit, the grumpy incompetent Indian governments institutions are successful in achieve its most important goal that is to protect the great Indian democracy and unity. This is no easy task. Any future changes to the system should ensure our democracy and unity would not be at risk.

During the recent past, the Central government has taken some good steps to adjust the countries institutional set up to enable the country to better face the new challenges. Right to Information act, creation of the new central agency to investigate terrorism cases and the creation of the office of National Security Advisor in the last decade were all good example of institutional strengthening. Though these changes are delayed and reactionary, nonetheless should be appreciated.

The challenge for the future of the Indian state is while keeping its institutions and democratic forces inclusive and unites a billion + people, trigger positive changes in its design so that it will become more capable, assertive and effective in serving the interest of its own citizens.

To this end, a more thorough across the level rethinking is needed on the way people’s representatives and bureaucrats are recruited, and maintained and held accountable. This is a very complex subject and cannot be discussed in a single blog post . A good book for anyone interested in this subject is “Public Institutions in India: Performance and Design” by Devesh Kapur.

Government Institutions are above the interest of a few people; they are immortal and are the real guardians of our democracy. I hope enough attention and resources will be spent on strengthening it. All of us have a huge stake in it.