Recasting Public Administration In India

This title is an important contribution to critical literature on public administration in India. It examines efforts at administrative reforms and the shifts that created new institutions and practices that are being planted on the existing foundations inherited from colonial rule. It provides an account of the unsuccessful attempts at administrative reform during the plan period in spite of advice of numerous committees and commissions and reports of international experts.

Ever since a democratic system of government was adopted and a strategy of planned economic development was launched in India, the planners were quite conscious of the need for an administrative system different from the colonial one to implement the planned objective of development. Kuldeep Mathur, in this volume, examines these administrative reforms and provides a magisterial account of the changes in the institutional process of public administration. The introduction of neoliberal policies revived concerns about reform and change, thereby giving rise to a new vocabulary in the discourse of public administration. The conventional world of public administration was now expected to adopt management practices of the private sector and interact with it to achieve public policy goals. New institutions are now being layered on traditional ones, and India is becoming a recipient of managerial ideas whose efficacy has yet to be tested on Indian soil. In light of the aforementioned changes, this volume argues that hybrid architecture for delivering public goods and services has been the most significant transformation to be institutionalized in the current era and critiques the neoliberal transformation from within a mainstream public administration perspective.

Contributed articles.

This book is about public administration in India, which is often synonymous with the role and performance of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). The author stresses the indispensability of the civil service in a democratic polity like India and the decisive role it plays in assisting with the social and economic development of the country. He also examines the corruption in the bureaucracy and the question of ethics and morality and analyses elaborate and competitive recruitment process of the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) of India.

Traces the history of public administration in india from ancient to contemporary times.Written in an easy and direct style, the book meets the needs of both the layperson and student. Aaalso a handy guide for aspirants entrants to the civil services.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the administration in India from independence to date. It examines the major transformation in the administrative service initiated by the ‘Minimum Government and Maximum Governance’ initiative of the Government of India in 2014. In spite of enormous diversity and population, India has made remarkable progress in various fields such as health, education, infrastructure, and technology. Structured in three parts, (1) social sector, (2) infrastructure and economy, and (3) e-governance and service delivery, the book examines challenges of governance and provides insight into different innovations undertaken to address these challenges. E-governance lies at the core of this transformation of accountability, transparency, and time-bound service delivery. Contributions in this book are written by experts working in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), academia, and the private sector and cover a wide spectrum of administration from the point of view of different departments of government, as well as the experiences of the authors ranging from senior bureaucrats to mid-career officers and analyses of researchers on administration and its challenges. The initiatives covered in this book can serve as solutions to similar challenges faced by other developing countries in the world. The book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of administration and policy, civil service, public management, South Asian politics, and Development Studies.