We in India, especially the middle class, are quick to blame the street-level bureaucracy (SLB) for faulty implementation of what we consider to be impeccably-designed policies.
The match went down to the wire … ultimately, the winner was decided by the third umpire. No, I am not referring to a close finish in a cricket T20 match, but to the results of the Rajya Sabha polls in Gujarat.
Last week marked the 40th anniversary of the lifting of Emergency. The events are captured well in the first of Pranab Mukherjee’s three volume memoirs
The indifferent experience of a number of other states that launched Nutrition Missions based on the Maharashtra model is a clear indication that standard bureaucratic interventions will not work
Be it electricity supply, access to drinking water, public health, safety, transportation or job opportunities, infrastructural deficiencies are leading to a widening gap between different social and economic strata
Every Indian should have access to banking channels where her money can be parked; and there should be ease and efficiency of transactions, and secure, accurate identification of the account holder to check diversion of benef
Governments, especially state and local, should pro-actively assess and list activities where their efforts will be positively boosted by private support
The petroleum ministry is trying to paint the offer of small oilfields as an attractive bait to private investors when, by its own admission, these fields were not monetised by ONGC & OIL
Combining responsive governance with the intelligent use of data in a systematic, disciplined manner and adopting a standard operating protocol can yield rich dividends
The IAS and other services suffer from lack of professionalism and absence of domain expertise. Rather than squabble over short-term service benefits, the decision-makers must go for a radical remake of civil services
The cocktail of an unhealthy government-business relationship, antediluvian government processes and a sluggish rule of law does not augur well for either democracy or for sustained economic growth
