Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T04:43:39.808Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - Patronage and Politicisation in the Indian Administrative Service

from Part I - One-Party Dominated Systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2023

B. Guy Peters
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
Colin Knox
Affiliation:
Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan
Byeong Seob Kim
Affiliation:
Seoul National University
Get access

Summary

At the bureaucratic level, Indias administration and policymaking are largely controlled by members of the elite Indian Administrative Service (IAS). Their initial recruitment is on merit and considered fair, and therefore the best brains in the country join the Service at a young age. However, despite their individual competence, IAS officers, who occupy almost all senior administrative positions in the States and Centre, have not been able to improve development outcomes for common citizens. This is largely due to the fact that the political culture in India, at the states level and now since 2014 also at the Central level, is patronage based, and politicians control the civil service to buttress their private gains and ideological goals. This chapter will describe in detail the interface between bureaucrats and politicians, and the methods employed by politicians to manipulate and politicise the civil service. The paper will also describe how politicisation of the senior civil servants has engulfed the entire system after Mr Modi took over as Prime Minister in 2014.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Administrative Reforms Commission. (2008). ‘Public Order.’ Fifth Report of the Second Administrative Reforms Commission. New Delhi: Government of India.Google Scholar
Banik, Dan. (2001). The Transfer Raj: Indian Civil Servants on the Move. European Journal of Development Research, June, 13(1), 106134.Google Scholar
Bardhan, Pranab. (2016). Democratic Development in India: Reflections on Problems and Prospects. In Törnquist, O. and Harriss, J. (Eds.), Reinventing Social Democratic Development: Insights from Indian and Scandinavian Comparisons. Copenhagen: Nias Press.Google Scholar
Béteille, Tara. (2015). Fixers in India’s Teacher Labour Markets: Behind the Scenes. Asian Survey, 55(5), 942968.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bhat, Naseer Ahmad, Shameem, Bazila and Yadav, Nisha. (2020). Downward Spiral in Civil Service Anonymity and Neutrality: An Analysis of Indian Bureaucracy during Rise of Chauvinism and Right-Wing Nationalism. Palarch’s Journal of Archaeology of Egypt/Egyptology, 17(7), 51585168.Google Scholar
Chand, Vikram K. (2010). Public Service Delivery in India: Understanding the Reform Process. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, E. (2020). New Developmentalism and Its Discontents: State Activism in Modi’s Gujarat and India. Development and Change.Google Scholar
Cooper, C.A. (2021). Politicization of the Bureaucracy across and within Administrative Traditions. International Journal of Public Administration, 44(7), 564577.Google Scholar
Dahlström, Carl, Lapuente, Victor and Teorell, Jan. (2012). The Merit of Meritocratization: Politics, Bureaucracy, and the Institutional Deterrents of Corruption. Political Research Quarterly, 65(3), 656668.Google Scholar
Das, Sabyasachi and Sabharwal, Gaurav. (2017). “Whom Are You Doing a Favor to? Political Alignment and Allocation of Public Servants.” at https://ashoka.edu.in/static/doc_uploads/file_1537331284.pdfGoogle Scholar
Deshpande, S. (2019). Governing Nutrition, Performing State: Workers of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) Programme, India (Doctoral dissertation, University of Sussex).Google Scholar
Gupta, Vishal. (2016). Indian Administrative Service and Crony Capitalism. In Crony Capitalism in India (pp. 177205). London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Iyer, Lakshmi and Mani, Anandi. (2012). Traveling Agents: Political Change and Bureaucratic Turnover in India. Review of Economics and Statistics, 94(3), 723–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kapur, Devesh. (2020). Why Does the Indian State both Fail and Succeed? The Journal of Economic Perspectives (Winter) 34(1), 3154.Google Scholar
McDonnell, D. and Cabrera, L. (2019). The Right-wing Populism of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (and Why Comparativists should Care). Democratization, 26(3), 484501.Google Scholar
Peters, B.G. and Pierre, J. (Eds.). (2004). Politicization of the Civil Service in Comparative Perspective. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Poguntke, T. and Webb, P. (2005). The Presidentialization of Politics in Democratic Societies: A Framework for Analysis. The Presidentialization of Politics: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies, 1, 125.Google Scholar
Pritchett, Lant. (2009). Is India a Flailing State?: Detours on the Four Lane Highway to Modernization. HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series RWP09-013, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rauch, James E. and Evans, Peter B.. (2000). Bureaucratic Structure and Bureaucratic Performance, in Less Developed Countries. Journal of Public Economics, 75(1), 4971.Google Scholar
Rogenhofer, J.M. and Panievsky, A. (2020). Antidemocratic Populism in Power: Comparing Erdoğan’s Turkey with Modi’s India and Netanyahu’s Israel. Democratization, 27(8), 13941412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ruparelia, Sanjay (2015). ‘Minimum Government, Maximum Governance’: The Restructuring of Power in Modi’s India. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 38(4), 755775.Google Scholar
Saxena, N.C. (2018). Land Acquisition Law in India. Journal of Resources, Energy and Development, 15(1–2), 111.Google Scholar
Saxena, N.C. (2019). What Ails the IAS & Why It Fails to Deliver? An Insider’s View. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Sircar, Jawhar. (2020). Picking, Kicking and Wrecking: Subjugation of the Bureaucracy in the Modi Regime, The Wire, 7 SEP.Google Scholar
Sircar, Jawhar. (2021). IAS and Bureaucracy: All the Prime Minister’s Men, The New Indian Express, 17th March.Google Scholar
Varshney, Ashutosh. (2019). Modi Consolidates Power: Electoral Vibrancy, Mounting Liberal Deficits. Journal of Democracy, 30(4), October, 6377.Google Scholar
Wade, Robert. (1985). The Market for Public Office: Why the Indian State is not Better at Development. World Development, 13(4), 467497.Google Scholar
World Bank. (2003). Government employment and pay in global perspective: a selective synthesis of international facts, policies and experience, by Salvatore Schiavo-Campo, Giulio de Tommaso, and Amitabha Mukherjee.Google Scholar
Worsdell, T. and Shrivastava, K. (2020). Locating the Breach: Mapping the Nature of Land Conflicts in India. New Delhi: Land Conflict Watch.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×