Originally Published on @TheRealist, The Times of India blog on Nov 10, 2022
(This is an AI Generated Image created on Dall E Studio 2)
India is on its way to becoming a 5 trillion-dollar economy. In the past 75 years, the nation has achieved tremendous feats from taking millions of people out of poverty to sending a man into outer space. The world looks up to India and has tremendous hopes pinned on the nation to lead the world into the 21st century through its value based leadership and its ability to deliver development at scale. Every year, on India’s Independence Day, leaders across the globe listen intently to the Prime Minister’s address from the Red Fort to gain insight into India’s vision and ambition for the future. From the vision of Swacch Bharat to the vision of “Viksit Bharat” – that of seeing India as a truly developed nation by its 100th anniversary of Independence in 2047, PM Modi has set a progressive and positive agenda for India.
For India to bolster its position as a world leader, its effective delivery of governance needs to become something that others would want to emulate, thereby, making it a pull factor in its soft power arsenal. The country has already begun to show the power of digitization in the delivery of governance. The Digital India Mission deserves great credit for India’s resilience during the pandemic as the businesses of the country moved swiftly online, remaining ever connected to global markets, and even selling essential products (such as vaccines) and services to the world, thanks to the exponential increase in the citizens’ digital literacy and access to affordable internet.
India is showing how the use of satellite technologies, software, smartphones, and dashboards can enhance public service delivery, reduce wastage, and curb corruption and red-tapism. The whole array of direct benefit transfer schemes and one-stop-shop solutions such as UMANG (Unified Mobile Application for New Age Governance) that gives citizens access to 339 government services are emblematic of India’s progress towards becoming a developed nation. These initiatives are likely to give tremendous payoffs for citizens in the future and will be remembered as defining moments in Indian history.
Another potential defining moment in India’s history of growth could be the carrying out of comprehensive civil service reforms. Civil service reforms have been high on the agenda for the Government of India since the time PM Modi occupied the helm of affairs. “The first goal is to make a difference in the lives of ordinary people in the country”, he rightly remarked on this year’s Civil Services Day somewhat echoing the sentiment of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the first Home Minister of India who advised the officers that: “Your predecessors were brought up in the traditions in which they … kept themselves aloof from the common run of the people. It will be your bounden duty to treat the common men in India as your own”.
There are indeed many dynamic, passionate, and effective bureaucrats that India can boast of, and rightly so. However, in order to have individual passion and talent seep into the system, there should be systemic changes that ensure the benchmarking of the performance of each government department vis-à-vis its annual action plan. Initiatives such as the linking of department-level action plans to the performance of the individuals (Secretary or Joint Secretaries) leading the department, clear performance parameters linked with incentives to identify high performers while rewarding them and weeding out poor performance, and a much larger focus on outcomes rather than inputs or processes could prove to be game changers in improving public service delivery and the overall quality of governance in India.
With reforms that lead to greater departmental capacity to deliver including outcome-based tenures, training programs linked to individual competency sets, and a culture based on results-based and participative management practices, the Indian civil services can set itself apart and truly emerge as an elite-yet-inclusive force that can serve as the harbinger of a progressive India. The hope is to see PM Modi announcing the Mission to systemically reform India’s civil service apparatus to gear it to become the vehicle to create a “Viksit Bharat”.
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