Public Works Reform In India

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Reprint of the original, first published in 1873.

This book asks why some governments improve public services more effectively than others. Through the investigation of a new era of administrative reform, in which digital technologies may be used to facilitate citizens' access to the state, Jennifer Bussell's analysis provides unanticipated insights into this fundamental question. In contrast to factors such as economic development or electoral competition, this study highlights the importance of access to rents, which can dramatically shape the opportunities and threats of reform to political elites. Drawing on a sub-national analysis of twenty Indian states, a field experiment, statistical modeling, case studies, interviews of citizens, bureaucrats, and politicians, and comparative data from South Africa and Brazil, Bussell shows that the extent to which politicians rely on income from petty and grand corruption is closely linked to variation in the timing, management, and comprehensiveness of reforms. The book also illuminates the importance of electoral constituencies and coalition politics in shaping policy outcomes.

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.