Devolution of authority: The ideal way to fulfil people’s expectations

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. India has about 25 million government employees, five million government school teachers, over two million police personnel and 25,000 judges at the district, high court and Supreme Court levels. Add to these India’s armed forces of a million-plus and 1.4 million in the railways.

It is this large group that is administering state services for India’s citizens. This column, focused on administrative state capacity, is the fourth in a series on the ‘Quantity to Quality’ transformation that India needs to reach upper middle-income status and beyond. As a state matures, and its economy develops, the expectations of its citizenry also evolve.

For India, this is happening at a time when the world is changing at warp speed on aspirations, digitization, social media, artificial intelligence, molecular biology and much else. This rapid change in the environment and expectations creates an enormous burden on the state to induct the right personnel who can adapt to these changes and make and interpret policies that reflect the times. Of course, with India’s administrative group representing about 3% of the country’s population, all the building-block ideas covered in earlier columns in this series—a good public health system, effective primary and middle school education and meaningful pathways to professional development and specialization—are a prerequisite.