Reforming India’s Bureaucracy: A Multipronged Approach

Singapore’s government selects and trains the best students for bureaucratic position, a system worth emulating.

As someone with first-hand experience of how babudom (bureaucracy) functions in India, I am often amused, and at times distressed, by people’s assessment of how to cure the many ills of our bureaucracy.

It is understandably difficult for the outside observer to pin down the crux of the problem. It is clearly frustrating for the average Indian to pay taxes to sustain this huge, apparently useless institution whose members seem to only abuse power and enjoy perks and do no good, or not enough, at any rate.

Various analysts have narrowed down the problem to low salaries, fear of the vigilance and audit machinery, lure of post-retirement jobs, general lack of ethics in society and the like. The difficulty is that there is no easy formula to tackle these problems.