I am a regular listener to the podcasts from Pragati. I also read the articles on their website (www.thinkpragati.com). Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to the meat of the matter.
The recent spate of bad decisions by the government on many policies – demonetization, price caps on stents and food sold at multiplexes, the Maternity Care act – got me thinking on why our leaders get is so wrong, so often. The only plausible explanation I can find is that they are grossly unqualified for the job of creating policies for such a large nation. Actually, I had written, “unqualified for the job of leading such a large nation” in the earlier line. But then I realized that political leadership and making policy are very different activities. While our politicians are great at tapping into the pulse of the nation, they have no idea of economics and market forces to think up and implement good policy.
The Indian Administrative Service (IAS) was created to address this issue. The vision was to have popular leaders backed up by experts. But that doesn’t seem to have worked out so well for us. The IAS are mere pawns in the games of the political parties. Even worse, the IAS officers play along with our political masters to ensure they are on the right side of whoever is in power.
We need to have a system where the PM, at the national level, and the CM, at the state level, must put together a team of IAS officers, each of whom must be interviewed and cleared by the respective houses. It must be mandatory for the officer in-charge of a department to sign-off on any policy that the elected representative wants to pass into law. This will make the system a lot more transparent since the people will know who the key advisors to the government are. Moreover, the elected representatives will be bound to consider the recommendations of the more qualified officers from the IAS.
What I have suggested is merely an idea of a person standing on the pavement. Maybe someone more informed that come up with a better idea. Be that as it may, we definitely need to find a system that will curb the series of bad decisions our representatives seem to be making so regularly.
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