Episode 24: What ails Governance in India? What can we do to fix it?

https://rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/p/episode-24-what-ails-governance-in?r=66qfh&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=email

#babudom #weberian #steelframe #hierarchy #bureaucracy #skininthegame #selection #training #evaluation

Can the bureaucracy be reformed? What are its biggest problems and sins? Is it attitude, perhaps unchanged from James Mill's time, ie 1817? Is it the way they are recruited and trained? Does the problem lie in the way there's a brutal hierarchy in place where lesser babus are humiliated and treated as sub-humans while the elites play God? What about the way babudom is not accountable for results achieved (or not)? Why do they have no skin in the game? How can evaluation be made more rigorous? Do they stick up for each other to the detriment of the national interest? What about all the little jaunts to Harvard etc that they go on: are these useful to India or to someone else? Are they giving away Big Data about India to possibly malign outsiders? A no-holds-barred critique of what's good and what's bad with India's fabled babus.

Can babudom be salvaged? The answer: a big 'Maybe'.