In his article, Is India a Flailing State? Detours on the Four Lane Highway to Modernization, Lan Pritchett of Harvard Kennedy School says, To understand the Indian State today one has to read fiction because non-fiction, the streams of Government reports and commissions and documents produced by official agencies (including of those foreign agencies working with the Govt.) are truly fiction. Because of the incredibly spectacular intelligence, cleverness and competence of the top tiers of the Indian Government - in particular the national services such as the Indian Administrative Service - it has managed to project the myth that India is just another regular modern State, with a growing economy, a democratic politics, a functional civil service, and making progress on social issues. He further says, I argue that India is today a Flailing State - a nation, state in which the head, that is the elite institutions at the national (and in some states) level remain sound and functional but that his head is no longer reliably connected via nerves and sinews to its own limbs. In many parts of India in many sectors, the everyday actions of the field level agents of the state - policemen, engineers, teachers, health workers - are increasingly beyond the control of the administration at the national or state level. Any thoughts, suggestions, remedies on this?
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 16:02:00 +0000
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