The Steel Frame A History Of The Ias

Deepak Gupta did his BA from Allahabad, MA from St Stephen’s college and MPhil in International relations from JNU. From the IAS batch of 1974, he has spent many years in the field in the erstwhile state of Bihar, including two districts (Saharsa 1979–80; Rohtas 1986–88) as Collector. He served in many departments in state and center and was also posted in India Trade Centre, Brussels and spent a year as WHO Advisor on TB in Delhi. He retired in 2011 as Secretary, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy. After retirement he consulted with the World Bank and UNIDO and writes on issues of energy and sustainable development. He was Chairman of UPSC from November 2014 to September 2016. His published works include Documentation of Participatory Irrigation Management, Covering a Billion with DOTS, Achieving Universal Energy Access in India: Challenges and Way Forward, and Caught by the Police.

An unorthodox and maverick administrator, the author worked in top policy positions, but the system rejected the reforms that he advocated. In his career he followed the economic philosophy of ‘socialism for the poor and free market for the rich’. However, the political and administrative system in India seemed to believe in ‘indifference to the poor and control over the rich to facilitate rent seeking’. The book is full of anecdotes ranging from how the author resisted political corruption that led to the Prime Minister’s annoyance to a situation when the author himself ‘bribed’ the Chief Minister to scrap oppressive laws against tribal women. As Joint Secretary, Minorities Commission, the author exposed the communal bias of the district administration in handling riots in Meerut; he was punished for bringing to light the killing of innocent Muslim women and children by the police. When Bihar became a ‘failed state’ during the Lalu Prasad Yadav era of 1990–2005, the author did not hesitate in rebuking the Chief Secretary who was his senior in service, and accused IAS officials in Bihar of behaving like English-speaking politicians. Despite their high integrity, hard work and competence, IAS officials do not exercise sufficient control over the field staff who collude with the junior staff in reporting false figures on hunger deaths, malnutrition and usage of toilets, leading to erosion of accountability. Not only do many welfare programmes such as NREGA, ICDS and PDS have design flaws, governance in India at the state and district levels is also quite weak, manifesting itself in poor service delivery, uncaring administration, corruption, and uncoordinated and wasteful public expenditure. Analysing the present Indian situation, the book suggests policy changes in all cross-cutting systemic issues such as the role of politicians, tenure, size and nature of Indian bureaucracy, accountability, monitoring of programmes and civil service reforms, which will transform individual competencies of IAS officers into better collective outcomes.

Is the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) still the most appropriate institution to govern twenty-first-century India? Should a cadre of generalists head organizations as complex and diverse as industrial units; museums and rural development boards? If it had to be replaced; what is the best alternative? Drawing on his experience of thirty-six years in the IAS; Bhaskar Ghose addresses these and other major questions regarding the role; relevance and effectiveness of India’s long-established but often controversial system of state administration in The Service of the State. Ghose argues forcefully that the IAS is still the best option and one moreover that substantially fulfils its functions—and fulfils them well. Though its once sterling reputation has been tarnished by allegations of corruption; political subservience and declining standards of efficiency; there are still sufficient numbers of dedicated public servants. These administrators; spanning diverse social backgrounds; seniorities and regional profiles; draw on established traditions of duty and of cooperation within the service to deliver—to the best of their ability and often in the face of considerable odds—the goods of development. This reflective and luminous memoir is not only a portrait of a lifetime’s service to the state; it is also a timely and persuasive argument for a system of governance that has had a critical impact on India since Independence.

Making a Difference comes as a handy guidebook for IAS aspirants in the country. The preface is by Yogendra Narayan, a retired IAS officer and also the ex-chief secretary of U.P. The introduction is about the challenges and opportunities of IAS as a career. It also includes everything from the motives to join the IAS to the written exam to the personality test to the training required. The book also talks about the myths and realities about the IAS - interesting sections include questions about integrity, how citizens perceive the IAS, and what is the IAS' relationship with the political executive of the government.

Whatever its faults, the Indian bureaucracy cannot be accused of bias when it comes to confounding those who have to deal with it. Veteran insiders who return to it with their petitions after retirement are as clueless about how it functions as freshly minted supplicants. Outsiders in any case have little knowledge of who is responsible for what and why or how to navigate that critical proposal through the treacherous shoals of the secretariat. At the top of the heap is the fast-tracked elite civil servant, who belongs to a group of generalist and specialized services selected through a competitive examination. The aura of the Indian Administrative Service has remained intact over the years. Lack of awe, bordering on civilized disrespect, is a most effective learning tool. In this humorous, practical book, T.R. Raghunandan aims to deconstruct the structure of the bureaucracy and how it functions, for the understanding of the common person and replaces the anxiety that people feel when they step into a government office with a healthy dollop of irreverence.

The difficulty of finding solutions After six decades of policy-making and planning that appear perfect on paper, vast pockets of poverty persist across the country, accompanied by low human development indices. In Poor but Spirited in Karimnagar, Sumita Dawra recounts her experiences as collector in the district of Karimnagar in Andhra Pradesh, and grapples with the question of why even with crores of rupees of government funding, well-meaning implementing agencies and constructive action, this wide gap between intention and results continues. The stories cover diverse populations, from child labour to cotton farmers, from coal miners to malnourished power loom weavers. They traverse the thick Naxal-infested forests, course along the Godavari, and meander through the 'multiple urban worlds' of Ramagundem and the dry upland areas of Sircilla, examining the key issues that need to be addressed. Each chapter, divided into three sections - identifying the problem, providing the context, and offering the solution, along with a useful statistical guide that provides a quick overview - looks at the key points of lacunae in service delivery in the concerned areas and provides a starting point for a more effective engagement in the tackling of the problems. Based on successful models of governance within the country and elsewhere, this book from a seasoned bureaucrat offers a fresh, contemporary perspective on administration and governance.

Autobiographical reminiscences of a former civil servant of India discussing the sorry state of Indian civil services.

Following in the wake of his groundbreaking work War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa presents a brilliant, radical synthesis of historical development of the last thousand years. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, while engaging — in an entirely unprecedented manner — the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that see history merely as the arena of texts, discourses, ideologies, and metaphors, De Landa traces the concrete movements and interplays of matter and energy through human populations in the last millennium. The result is an entirely novel approach to the study of human societies and their always mobile, semi-stable forms, cities, economies, technologies, and languages. De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to human societies: economics, biology, and linguistics. In each case, De Landa discloses the self-directed processes of matter and energy interacting with the whim and will of human history itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of rigid teleology and naive notions of progress and, even more important, free of any deterministic source for its urban, institutional, and technological forms. The source of all concrete forms in the West’s history, rather, is shown to derive from internal morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter—energy itself. A Swerve Edition.