GOVERNANCE AND ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS
1. There are always many worries about governance in India. Thousands of crores of rupees are allotted to rural development, social justice, sports, road, pollution removal in rivers, forest development, education etc. Near unanimous general feeling is that very little reaches the destination. Most investors or potential investors say that India is one of the difficult places to do business…. In legal systems there are complaints on police, enormous delays in justice… the industries and services controlled Govt. as public sectors perform inefficiently and those which try to do well are often stymied.
2. What to do ? There are hundred of solutions – reams of papers ! In this paper written at the invitation of Indian Council of Social Research (ICSSR), Y.S. Rajan gives a brief description of how Govt. agencies works not on written down procedures alone but several other officer order, Dear Secretary letters etc. which are too many since 1960’s and accumulate one over another.
3. He has introduced an important concept of System Time Constraints in governance and need to keep it in tune with dominant technologies of the day. He states that like Raj Krishna’s Hindu Rate of Growth (which has now been broken by Indian economy), Indian system time constants which he calls as India – time – rate – of – interaction is about 7 to 10 years for any well accepted idea to fructify into a level for action of that order. That is why Indian governance is so bad, frustrating.
4. He then gives some drastic solutions to change it with logical reasons. Since those who are in the current system have made it what it is now (and have been selected by it) the cybernetics of it can be changed only when a substantive part of it is changed and given new algorithms (i.e. procedures) to work on. He has given practical suggestions.
5. He states any intermediate tinkering won’t help. Heroes cannot do – it needs a system overhaul. Now read the article.
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