On India's Governance

Daniel Drezner has a link to Guruchara Das’s op-ed in the Financial Times about India’s Crisis of Governance.

No single institution has disappointed us more than our bureaucracy. When we were young we bought the cruel myth of the “steel frame” – a stable system that would provide continuity. We were told that Britain was not as well-governed as India because it did not have the Indian Civil Service. Today our bureaucracy has become the single biggest obstacle to development. Indians think of their bureaucrats as self-serving, obstructive and corrupt. Instead of shepherding through economic reforms, they are blocking them.

In the 1950s, the idealistic Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, wanted a regulatory framework for his “mixed economy”, but instead, in the holy names of socialism, the bureaucrats created a thousand controls and killed our industrial revolution at birth. In my 30 years in business I did not meet a single bureaucrat who really understood my business, yet each had the power to ruin it. Our failures have been due less to ideology and more to poor management.[Daniel Drezner]

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  1. India’s crisis of governance
    The fault may not lie with the bureaucracy JK and Daniel Drezner point to Gurcharan Das’ article in the Financial Times about India’s crisis of governance. Das contends that India’s poor infrastructure and ineffective public services are due to a failu…

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