India grows at night while the government sleeps, says American think-tank

An American think-tank has attributed India's slow transition to a middle-income economy to a lethargic and an inefficient bureaucracy and has called for the reshaping of the recruitment and promotion processes for bureaucrats to enable the country to take up 21st century challenges.

In a research paper, the Carnegie Endowment International has said that India's considerable economic progress has happened despite its bureaucracy, which is highlighted by the fact that its public-sector institutions have struggled to keep pace with the rapid economic advancement. "Unless India is able to reform its administrative apparatus, sustained economic gains will prove elusive," said the paper.

While transfers and political pressure have come up as focal points affecting the bureaucracy, the paper finds that bureaucrats approve projects faster, when an incumbent politician has more chances of winning the election. And it has also found that efficiency was also linked to when an officer was up for promotion. The probability that an IAS officer would be transferred in a given year is 53 per cent, and this increases by 10 per cent when a state elects a new chief minister. The average tenure of an IAS officer in any given post is a mere 16 months, which stands in contrast to recommendations of various expert committees that have argued for fixed tenures as long as five years. In India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, tenure in posts was seen as low as six months. Ashok Khemka, an IAS officer who joined the Haryana cadre in 1991, is one famous case in point: for exposing endemic corruption across various state-government departments, he has been transferred 47 times in 24 years.

According to a measure of government effectiveness developed by the World Bank, India's performance is middling. Data from 2014 has placed India in the 45th percentile globally, nearly a 10 percentage point decline from the country's position in 1996 . With regard to the impact on economic development, in places where the probability of an officer being transferred increased by 10 percentage points, poverty rates exhibited a much slower pace of decline than in other districts—suggesting lasting damage to policy outcomes

The paper reveals that despite an incredibly competitive entrance examination —in 2016, some 180 candidates were selected from a pool of 465,882 applicants (a success rate of 0.038 percent) — the government is finding it hard to lure young talent away from increasingly attractive private-sector opportunities. The success rate has declined from 11.26% in 1950 to 0.18% in 2015, even though number of applicants has risen in geometric proportions. The reasons of lethargy vary and more so, diminishing human capital and political interference had led to institutional decline. "Older officers who enter the service as part of larger cadres face limited career prospects and are less effective at improving economic outcomes," it said.

The Carnegie Endowment International has asked the Central and state governments to pass and implement pending legislation that protects bureaucrats against politically motivated transfers and postings. Also they recommend that the government should consider the proposal that officers deemed unfit for further service at certain career benchmarks be compulsorily retired through a transparent and uniform system of performance review. While the present government has moved in this direction, this procedure has not been institutionalised.