Indore: Delivering a talk on, ‘Changing face of public administration in India’, at IIM Indore on Wednesday, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration deputy director Alok Mishra said the idea of development has always been a western one.
‘Economically, the development was mostly dependent on agriculture or small scale, face to face transactions. However, in the modern times, it shifted to large scale corporations, which led to creation of large scale impersonal transactions. Similarly, the previous political structure was fractured or personalistic.
But now, citizens control the nation-state. On the administrative front, the development has shifted from being patronage-based to civil service bureaucracies,” he said. Dr Mishra said there might be difference or gap between what is expected from the government and the delivery because politicians and bureaucrats are self-serving and incompetent or may be the government and public policy works in a domain that we don’t understand.
He spoke at length about understanding state and development paradigm, public policy and the policy cycle, bureaucracy and its changing paradigm and skills the leaders and managers need in order to become successful administrators.
Discussing the six broad dimensions of governance of over 200 countries and territories from 1996-2015, Mishra highlighted the changes in voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of laws and control of corruption.
“However, India still has a lot of challenges to overcome,” he said. Sharing why India has unparalleled opportunities, Dr Mishra said, “Economically, we’re going to have a huge consumer market of $3.6 trillion by 2025 and our substantial GDP growth would be $20 trillion. We will have 99% literacy rate, which would give us skilled workforce and be the youngest nation with average Indian age of 29 years.”