Evolution of Indian Administration

Why the Past Matters Here

Indian administration is not a design but a deposit. The district officer, the secretariat, the file, the tenured service recruited by competition and the revenue system all reached independent India already formed, and the republic inherited an apparatus built to hold a territory and collect from it, then asked it to develop a society and answer to an electorate. Almost every difficulty in Paper II descends from that mismatch, which is why the evolution of the system is a diagnostic topic rather than a historical preliminary.

The Kautilyan Tradition

Kautilya's Arthashastra gives a detailed account of Mauryan administration: the status and powers of the king, the council of ministers, the limits on the exercise of those powers, and descriptions of the revenue system, the local system and the spy system.

Is It a Text of Public Administration?

Many scholars have treated the Arthashastra as a complete book of public administration, and the claim needs qualifying. The principles of public administration are not stated as principles in the text. What the work supplies is Kautilya's analysis of the political system of his time, from which a detailed programme of administrative principles can be drawn out. The distinction matters for an answer: the Arthashastra is evidence of administrative thought rather than a treatise of administrative theory, and reading it as the latter produces the anachronism that critics of the comparison object to.

Principles Found in Kautilya's Administration

• Division of labour. Kautilya distributed the functions of governance across departments and personnel, dividing the work into eighteen departments. Every classical thinker treats division of work as the first principle of administration, on the ground that without it an organisation is a crowd rather than a structure.
• Centralisation. All power rested with the king, so that he could take the decisions required for the smooth functioning of the state. The classical school likewise emphasised centralisation.
• Order and discipline, which Kautilya connects to centralisation: because power is concentrated, discipline and order can be maintained across the state, and unity of command and unity of direction can be sustained together.
• Hierarchy and supervision, running from the king through the amatyas and departmental superintendents to district and village officers, with each level reporting upward.
• Personnel doctrine, in the attention given to the qualities required of ministers, their testing before appointment, and the fixing of salaries in graded scales, which is a recognisably administrative concern rather than a merely political one.

The Structure of the Mauryan State

• The king was the focal point of the empire, expansionist in tendency and, in the text's own framing, bound to sympathy towards his subjects. He administered with the advice of a council of ministers whose advice was not binding, since he retained the sovereign right to act on his own judgement. The modern parallel is exact in form and different in substance: the Council of Ministers aids and advises, and the advice does not bind, but the modern executive is answerable to a legislature where the Mauryan king was not.
• The amatyas, the council of ministers, made the strategic and operational decisions of governance. They held distinct portfolios, were responsible for their departments and were accountable to the king. No maximum number was fixed, and the associated departments are generally counted at eighteen; the modern contrast is that the 91st Amendment fixes a ceiling on the size of the Council of Ministers.
• The tirthas, the eighteen departments, constituted a recognisable secretariat, with most high officers functioning as secretaries and a class of senior officials assisting them. A portfolio system with departmental allocation existed, which is the administrative fact that makes the comparison with a modern state worth drawing at all.
• Provincial administration was conducted by a governor responsible for law and order, revenue collection and justice, carrying out those duties through subordinate officers while remaining under the direct control of the centre, and obliged to communicate the working of the province to it. The parallel drawn in the literature is with the modern governor, appointed by the Union, acting as its agent, reporting on the state's functioning, and administering it through subordinates when constitutional machinery fails.
• Local administration is attested in Megasthenes's Indica, which describes urban administration conducted by committees with distinct charges including taxation and the census. Mauryan administration may be the first empire in the world to have conducted a census, which is a claim about administrative capacity rather than about scale. At the village level officers such as the gramika, gopa and sthanika operated as the base of the structure.
• Justice was administered through two kinds of court, the dharmasthiya or religious court and the kantakashodhana court, whose functions correspond broadly to the modern civil and criminal jurisdictions. The separation of the two is the feature worth noting, since it distinguishes disputes between subjects from offences against the order of the state.
• Revenue. Kautilya's dictum that "all undertakings depend on finance" states the priority plainly. The tax system was organised to maintain a large empire and a large army, and rested principally on bali, a religious tribute, and bhaga, the levy on agricultural produce and cattle.

The Spy System

The espionage system was highly organised, of two kinds, organisational and communicational. Spies known as gudapurusha also supported the military. They were drawn from a variety of occupations, traders, snake charmers, blacksmiths, cultivators, and were trained for a year before deployment, which is a personnel system in miniature: recruitment from a wide base, task-specific training, and placement under cover of an ordinary occupation.

The modern parallel drawn in the literature is that India's intelligence organisations similarly maintain an organised system drawing personnel from many fields. The deeper administrative point is that the spy network was an information system: in the absence of records, audit and press, it was how the centre learned what its own officials were doing, which makes it an instrument of internal control as much as of external security.

The Mauryan State and the Modern Nation-State

Almost all the elements of a modern nation-state were present: a developed central government, provincial and local administration, a proper revenue and tax system, an organised intelligence apparatus and a system of justice. The resemblance is real and it is not identity, and the four differences the literature draws are the answer to any question inviting the comparison.

	Mauryan administration	Modern Indian state
Source of authority	The king, in whom power was concentrated	The people: the Preamble's "we the people" makes them the supreme authority
Distribution of power	Integration of power, all of it in the king's hands	Separation of powers, with legislature, executive and judiciary holding distinct duties and responsibilities
Basis of governance	Rule of individuals, monarchical in nature	Rule of law, with equality before the law and equal protection of the law
Recruitment	No systematic personnel recruitment system	Open recruitment on merit by competitive examination, irrespective of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, followed by training and performance-based promotion

There are genuine similarities between Mauryan and contemporary Indian administration, and the rise of democracy has produced institutions with no past counterpart. The honest formulation is that the Mauryan state was administratively sophisticated and politically pre-modern, and that the sophistication is what makes the comparison tempting while the politics is what makes it wrong.

Kautilya's Welfare State

The reading of the Kautilyan state as "neither a police state nor merely a tax-gathering state" rests on the purposes the Arthashastra assigns to the king. Order and revenue are means. The end is yogakshema, the security of what has been acquired together with the welfare and prosperity of the people. Kautilya places the king's happiness in the happiness of his subjects and his welfare in theirs, and tells him to treat as good not what pleases himself but what pleases his subjects.

His definition of artha supports the same reading. In the last book of the Arthashastra he defines artha as the livelihood (vritti) of men, and as the earth inhabited by men, and the Arthashastra as the science of acquiring and protecting that earth. The work is therefore a science of the livelihood of the people and of the territory that sustains it, which is why translating artha simply as wealth, and the work as a treatise on economics, is too narrow.

• Economic regulation. Superintendents (adhyakshas) supervised agriculture, trade, weights and measures, mines and state enterprises, and the state controlled prices and protected buyers against fraud by merchants and artisans.
• Social protection. The king was to maintain orphans, the aged, the infirm, the afflicted and helpless women, and in famine to distribute seed and provisions and start public works.
• Danda for protection. Punishment exists to prevent matsyanyaya, the law of the fishes in which the strong devour the weak, so even the coercive power of the state is justified by the protection it gives the weak.

Kautilyan and modern democratic rulers. The resemblance in purpose conceals a difference in structure. The Kautilyan king's duty of welfare is moral, grounded in dharma and in prudence, since a discontented people endangers the throne, and the subjects cannot enforce it. A modern democratic ruler's duty is legal and political, enforced through elections, parliamentary scrutiny, courts and fundamental rights, and the welfare provided is an entitlement rather than royal favour. Kautilya also allowed the king deception, espionage and almost any means in the interest of the state, which a constitutional order bound by the rule of law forbids. His emphasis on governing well, on the accountability of officials and on justice nonetheless anticipates the concerns of contemporary Indian governance, from the welfare state of the Directive Principles to audit by the CAG and the vigilance machinery.

Kautilya on the Integrity of Officials

Kautilya's approach to ethics in public service starts from the assumption that officials will be tempted, and builds controls around that assumption rather than relying on virtue alone. This is why the Arthashastra can be read as centrally concerned with ethics in public services, and also why the reading needs qualifying.

• Upadhas, the tests of integrity. Before appointment, ministers were tested in secret through four kinds of allurement: dharmopadha (religious), arthopadha (wealth), kamopadha (lust) and bhayopadha (fear). Only those who passed all four were fit for the highest posts, and others were employed according to the tests they had passed, those proof against monetary temptation, for instance, in revenue and treasury work.
• Forty ways of embezzlement. Kautilya listed some forty ways in which officials could misappropriate revenue. He observed that just as one cannot help tasting honey or poison placed on the tongue, an official handling the king's revenue cannot help tasting a little of it, and that detecting it is as hard as telling whether a fish moving in water is drinking.
• Controls. Accounts were submitted to the records and audit office, the akshapatala, officials were watched by spies, informers were rewarded, and embezzlement and misconduct carried graded fines and punishments.
• Discipline at the top. The king himself was to control his senses and follow a disciplined routine, since an undisciplined ruler corrupts the whole administration.

Assessment. Kautilya was a moralist in that he required righteous conduct of the king and his officers and treated dharma as the foundation of the state, and a realist in that he relied on testing, surveillance and punishment to secure it. His is an ethics of control, in which integrity is secured from outside by fear of detection more than from within by values the official holds, and his methods of secret temptation and espionage would be unacceptable in a democracy. The lesson he anticipates is that integrity needs institutions, audit, vigilance and the reduction of opportunity, and not exhortation alone.

The Mughal Tradition

The Mughal empire was among the largest and most powerful of its time, ruled by what the literature calls liberal despotic kings. The credit for the strength of Mughal administration goes principally to Akbar, who organised central, provincial and local administration systematically, and who reorganised revenue administration on modern lines with the advice of Todarmal, one of the navratnas.

Akbar's Theory of Monarchy

K.M. Panikkar holds that the foundations of Akbar's rule rested on a theory of kingship and constitutionalism resting on three claims: a divine right to rule, the establishment of a secular state in India, and the establishment of a welfare state. Whatever the historiographical contest over that reading, it identifies the feature that distinguishes Mughal from earlier administration: a conception of rulership carrying obligations to a plural population rather than only to a community.

The Three Levels

• Central. The emperor was the core of government, the ultimate source of authority and of justice. The structural weakness was the near-absence of rules governing succession, so that among Akbar's successors it was the powerful rather than the designated who became emperor, and the administrative apparatus was periodically disrupted by contests it had no procedure to settle.
• Provincial. The empire was divided into provinces, reaching a maximum of twenty-one under Aurangzeb, each ruled by a subahdar who was the focal point of administration, usually a son or close relative of the emperor, responsible for revenue, law and order, welfare and justice, and assisted by officers of whom the diwan was the most important. The province existed at the centre's pleasure, since its power was delegated from the centre: it had independence in day-to-day administration but required permission for strategic matters, so the centre dominated.
• Local. Local government was an important feature of the system, improved particularly by Akbar and Shah Jahan. Akbar created the mansabdar and appointed kirodi and faujdar officers; Shah Jahan created the chakla as a new unit of local administration. Present-day local revenue arrangements are in large part a modernised continuation of the Mughal system.

Justice and the Military

Justice. The emperor was among the highest authorities in the administration of justice, and below him the qazi-ul-quzat was responsible for its delivery. Some emperors, Aurangzeb notably, laid emphasis on morality in society and appointed special officers so that justice might reach the poor. Justice was for the most part administered according to the Mughal code, which survived into the early years of British rule, so that the transition of legal authority was considerably slower than the transition of political authority.

The military and the mansabdari system. Mughal administration rested on the dominance of power and therefore on the maintenance of a large army. The mansabdari system created by Akbar fused the military and civil services into one graded hierarchy: an officer held a mansab, a numerical rank determining his status, pay and the contingent of cavalry he was obliged to maintain. The arrangement is administratively interesting because it is a pure form of rank classification, the officer's position and emoluments attaching to his person rather than to any post, and because the officer's remuneration through assignment of revenue from land tied personnel administration directly to revenue administration.

Its structural weakness is equally instructive: an officer paid by assignment of land revenue has an interest in extracting from that land during the term of his assignment, and no interest in its long-term productivity. The problem of aligning the agent's interest with the principal's, which modern personnel and financial administration address through salary, audit and tenure, was the one the system could not solve.

What Carried Forward

The land revenue settlement, the district as the effective unit of administration, the combination of revenue collection with magisterial and police functions in a single local officer, and the maintenance of detailed land records all passed from the Mughal system through the Company to the modern collectorate. The British did not invent the district officer; they inherited the post, standardised it and gave it a covenanted service to fill.

Indian and Extra-Indian Elements

Jadunath Sarkar, in Mughal Administration, described the Mughal system as a Perso-Arabic system in an Indian setting: its higher institutions came from outside India, and its base, especially in revenue and local administration, was Indian.

• Extra-Indian elements. The central offices derived from the Persian and Abbasid tradition: the wazir or diwan in charge of revenue and finance, the mir bakhshi in charge of the army and the mansabdars, the sadr-us-sudur for religious grants and charity, the qazi administering Islamic law, and the muhtasib as censor of public morals. Persian was the language of administration, court ceremonial followed Persian models, and Abul Fazl's theory of kingship as a light from God drew on Persian ideas. The graded ranks of the mansabdari system recall the decimal organisation of Central Asian armies.
• Indian elements. The village and the pargana remained the units of revenue administration, with hereditary local officials: the patwari keeping village records, the qanungo keeping pargana records, and the village headman and the chaudhuri as intermediaries. Revenue methods built on those of Sher Shah and, through him, on older Indian practice. Akbar's policy of sulh-i-kul, the incorporation of Rajput chiefs into the mansabdari system and the employment of Hindu officials such as Todar Mal gave the empire an Indian ruling class alongside a foreign one.

Todar Mal and the Zabti System

Akbar's revenue system was worked out with Raja Todar Mal, who had earlier served under Sher Shah. Under the zabti system, land was measured with a standard unit and a bamboo jarib joined by iron rings, which did not shrink or stretch like the rope used earlier. Land was classified by the regularity of its cultivation into polaj (cultivated every year), parauti (left fallow for a short time), chachar (fallow for three or four years) and banjar (fallow for five years or more). Under the dahsala arrangement of 1580, the average produce and average prices of each crop over the preceding ten years were worked out, and the state's share, one-third of the average produce, was fixed in cash per unit of land. The system applied in the core provinces of northern India, while crop-sharing and other methods continued elsewhere.

The zabti system matters to Indian administration because it rested on measurement, classification and written records rather than on assessment at the collector's discretion, and that principle continued through the British land settlements into the modern land records system.

The British Legacy

Company Rule and the First Regulation

The Regulating Act of 1773 was the first attempt by the British Parliament to regulate the power and functioning of the East India Company, recognising Parliament's right to regulate the civil, military and revenue affairs of the Company's Indian territories. It changed the designation of the Governor of Bengal to Governor-General of Bengal and subordinated the Governors of Bombay and Madras to him, thereby laying the foundation of central administration in India. Warren Hastings was the first Governor-General of Bengal, and a Supreme Court was established at Calcutta in 1774 with a chief justice and three other judges.

Pitt's India Act of 1784 removed the defects of the Regulating Act by dividing the Company's activities into commercial and political. The Court of Directors was constituted for commercial functions and a Board of Control for political ones, with the Court of Directors made subordinate to the Board and the Board answerable to Parliament. This was the first step towards centralising power in British hands, and it established the dual structure, commerce under political supervision, that would govern India until 1858.

Cornwallis and the Making of a Civil Service

Lord Cornwallis is regarded as the father of the civil service in India. His reforms separated commercial from administrative functions, raised salaries to remove the excuse for private trade, prohibited officials from engaging in it, and introduced appointment and promotion by seniority within a covenanted service. His efforts were legalised by Parliament in the Charter Act of 1793.

The Cornwallis settlement also carried the decision that shaped Indian administration for a century: Indians were excluded from higher office, on the reasoning that only Europeans could be trusted with it. A service designed to be incorruptible was thereby designed to be alien, and the two features were connected in its founder's mind.

Lord Wellesley, Governor-General from 1798 after Sir John Shore's term (1793-98), opened a training institution for civil servants at Fort William, Calcutta, in 1800. His formulation of the change in their character is worth quoting: civil servants were no longer the agents of a commercial concern but the officers of a powerful sovereign state, and must therefore do their work accordingly. Between 1805 and 1833 the secretariat expanded rapidly as workload grew, and new departments and boards were created, including the Board of Customs and additional Boards of Revenue, which was the first step of decentralisation undertaken to cope with the volume of business.

The Charter Acts and Open Competition

• 1833. The Presidency of Bengal was divided into Bengal and Agra, and the Governor-General of Bengal became the Governor-General of India. Open competition for the civil service was proposed but not implemented, and Indians continued to be treated as subordinate to the British.
• 1853. The Act abolished the patronage system of recruitment and introduced a merit system. A committee under Lord Macaulay reported in 1854 on how the examination should work, the Civil Service Commission was set up in England in 1855, and the first competitive examination was held in London that year on the Macaulay Committee's recommendations, with an age limit of eighteen to twenty-three.

The examination was open and it was held in London, which is the point on which the nationalist critique turned: a competition formally open to all was practically closed to Indians by distance, cost and the age limit, so the merit principle and the exclusion operated together rather than against each other.

Under the Crown, 1858 to 1947

• In 1858 responsibility for conducting open competitions lay with the Board of Control and was later transferred to the British Civil Service Commission, with training for civil servants imparted in British universities.
• The Indian Civil Service Act, 1861 reserved certain principal posts for members of the covenanted service.
• The Statutory Civil Service Act of 1870 was enacted to remove the defects of the 1861 Act, providing for the appointment of Indians of standing to reserved posts by nomination.
• The Aitchison Commission of 1886, under Sir Charles Aitchison, recommended replacing the two-tier classification into covenanted and uncovenanted services with a three-tier classification into imperial, provincial and subordinate civil services; raising the maximum age to twenty-three; abolishing the statutory civil service system of recruitment; and filling a proportion of imperial civil service posts by promotion from the provincial services.
• The Islington Commission, the Royal Commission on Public Services in India under Lord Islington, was appointed in 1912 and reported in 1915, recommending a larger Indian share of higher appointments, though its report was overtaken by the war and by the constitutional reforms that followed.

The Constitutional Sequence

• Indian Councils Act, 1892. After 1861 the British were unwilling to concede further political reform, but the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885 channelled the demand and compelled some movement. The Act began a system of elections, though indirect; expanded the legislative council by including more Indian members; and gave members the right to raise questions at the time of the budget.
• Indian Councils Act, 1909, the Morley-Minto reforms. The legislative council was enlarged from sixteen to sixty members, members were allowed to ask supplementary questions, Indians were admitted to the Viceroy's Executive Council, and a separate electorate for Muslims was introduced, for which Lord Minto is known as the father of the communal electorate.
• Government of India Act, 1919, the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, which introduced dyarchy in the provinces, meaning dual or double government: provincial subjects were divided into reserved subjects, administered by the Governor with his executive council, and transferred subjects, administered by the Governor with ministers responsible to the legislature. Dyarchy is the first moment at which Indian ministers held executive responsibility, and it failed precisely because the division of subjects cut across the unity of administration, leaving ministers responsible for departments whose finance lay on the reserved side.
• Government of India Act, 1935, which introduced provincial autonomy in place of dyarchy at the provincial level, transferred dyarchy to the centre, provided for a federation, established a Federal Court, and created Public Service Commissions at the federal and provincial levels. Its structure, a federal division of powers with a strong centre, emergency provisions, and a governor with discretionary powers, was carried substantially into the Constitution of India, which is why the 1935 Act matters more to Indian administration than any other colonial statute.

Two Reforms That Shaped the Modern Machinery

Police and criminal law. The Police Act of 1861 created the provincial police force under the control of the district magistrate, with a structure and a subordination that survive substantially intact. Together with the codification of criminal law and procedure, it produced an apparatus of order that is among the most durable parts of the legacy, and among the most criticised, since a force designed to maintain the authority of an alien government was carried into a republic without a corresponding change in its accountability.

Local self-government. Lord Ripon, whose resolution of 1882 initiated local self-government, is regarded as the father of local self-government in India, and his report is termed the Magna Carta of local self-government here. Ripon gave more importance to local self-government than to district administration, precisely so that local bodies might develop as a school of democracy in rural India, which is an educative justification rather than an administrative one.

The line from Ripon runs directly into Paper II's later topics. Mahatma Gandhi was the first to advance gram swaraj, village self-rule; the Constitution makers recognised local self-government in Article 40, directing the State to organise village panchayats and endow them with the powers necessary to function as units of self-government; the Balwant Rai Mehta Committee recommended involving panchayati raj institutions in planning; and the 73rd and 74th Amendments gave the tier constitutional standing. Ripon's justification and Gandhi's are the same one, that local government teaches democracy, and it is a different argument from the efficiency case for decentralisation that development administration later made.

What the Legacy Consists Of

• A neutral, permanent, generalist civil service recruited by open competition, organised in an all-India cadre, and holding office independently of the government of the day.
• The district as the unit of administration, with the collector combining revenue, magisterial and coordinating functions.
• The rule of law and an independent judiciary, with administrative action justiciable and officials personally liable.
• The secretariat system, with policy formulated in secretariat departments and executed by attached and subordinate offices.
• Written record and procedure: the file, the note sheet, the precedent, and the manual.
• Financial control, with legislative appropriation, treasury procedure and independent audit.
• A federal structure with a strong centre, taken from the 1935 Act.

Assessment

The balanced judgement, and the one an examiner rewards, is that the legacy is genuinely double-edged rather than simply good or bad.

Its strengths were real: an administration of considerable integrity at its upper levels by the standards of its time, capable of maintaining order and revenue across a subcontinent, staffed by competitive examination when patronage was the norm elsewhere, and operating under law. India inherited a working machine, which most decolonising states did not, and that inheritance explains a good deal of the republic's capacity to hold elections, move populations and administer famine relief in its first decades.

Its defects were equally structural. The service was regulatory rather than developmental, built to maintain order and collect revenue, so it had no experience of promoting change and a settled preference against it. It was elitist and distant, the officer being socially and physically removed from the people. It was over-centralised, with initiative reserved to the top. It was generalist, distrusting the specialist at a moment when development required technical competence. It was procedure-bound, so that correctness of process displaced achievement of result. And it was designed for an unaccountable executive, so that the habits of secrecy and anonymity survived into a system in which the executive answers to an elected legislature.

The sharpest formulation is that the steel frame was built to hold a structure up, not to move it, and the demand made of it after 1947 was that it move.

The Charter Act of 1853 and the Legislative Council

The Charter Act of 1853, the last of the Charter Acts, for the first time separated the legislative from the executive functions of the Governor-General's council. It added six members for legislative purposes: the Chief Justice and a judge of the Supreme Court at Calcutta, and four representatives appointed by the provincial governments of Madras, Bombay, Bengal and Agra. The enlarged council, sitting for legislation, came to be known as the Indian (Central) Legislative Council.

• A mini-parliament. The legislative council adopted procedures modelled on those of the British Parliament, so that legislation was treated for the first time as a special function of government requiring its own machinery and process.
• Local representation. The provincial members brought regional representation into the central legislature for the first time.
• Beyond its brief. The council began to question the executive and debate its policy, acting as a forum of opposition, which is why the Indian Councils Act, 1861 confined it strictly to legislation.

The beginning of a parliamentary system? In form, yes: a separate legislative function, a deliberative body with parliamentary procedure, and the idea that law should be made by a distinct process. In substance, no. Every member was an official, no member was elected, no Indian sat in the council, and the executive was not responsible to it. The Act began parliamentary procedure in India, not parliamentary government, which needed elected members (indirectly from 1892), ministers responsible to a legislature (in the transferred subjects from 1919) and finally a Council of Ministers answerable to an elected House under the Constitution.

The Macaulay Committee, 1854

The Charter Act of 1853 ended patronage in appointments to the covenanted civil service, and the Committee on the Indian Civil Service under T.B. Macaulay reported in 1854 on how open competition should work.

• Appointment by open competitive examination instead of nomination by the Directors of the Company.
• Candidates should have the best liberal education England offered, ideally a degree from Oxford or Cambridge, and the examination should test it through general subjects such as English literature, history, mathematics, the classics and the sciences, rather than technical knowledge of administration.
• Selected candidates should spend a probationary period in England studying Indian law, history and languages before going to India.
• The Company's college at Haileybury, through which nominees had passed, was no longer to be the route of entry.

The report's premise was that men who had excelled in a general education of the highest kind would prove superior in any profession to those trained early for a particular calling. That is the doctrine of the gentleman generalist, and it links the ICS to the elite theory of bureaucracy associated with Pareto, Mosca and Michels: a small, select, socially homogeneous group, chosen for intellect and character, governing a large population with wide discretion. Philip Woodruff's history of the service called its members The Guardians, after Plato's ruling class, and Lloyd George in 1922 called it the "steel frame" of British rule.

Does the elitism persist? Several features of the Macaulay design survive in the Indian Administrative Service: selection by a general examination rather than for specific skills, the dominance of the generalist over the specialist, a small service with great authority over a large population, early responsibility, and a sense of corporate distinction from the people and from other services. Its social base long favoured the English-educated urban middle class. Against this, the service has been substantially democratised. Reservation and the use of Indian languages in the examination since the Kothari reforms have widened its social base, its members answer to elected ministers and are subject to the right to information and judicial review, and lateral entry, though contested, has opened its career monopoly at the margins. The fair conclusion is that the structure of the Macaulay model persists while its social exclusiveness has been much reduced.

The Indianisation of the Services

Indianisation was slow because the services were the instrument of control, and each concession was made reluctantly and under political pressure.

1. Open competition, 1853 to 1870. The examination was formally open to Indians but held in London, in English. Satyendranath Tagore became the first Indian to enter the ICS, in 1863. An Act of 1870 allowed Indians of merit to be nominated to posts reserved for the covenanted service, and Lytton's Statutory Civil Service (1879) was built on it.
2. The age-limit agitation. The maximum age was lowered to nineteen in 1876, which made the examination almost impossible for Indians, and a higher age limit and simultaneous examinations in India became central demands of the early nationalists and of the Congress from its first session in 1885.
3. Aitchison (1886) and Islington (1912 to 1915). The first created the imperial, provincial and subordinate services, giving Indians the provincial services, and the second recommended a larger Indian share of higher posts.
4. From 1922, after the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, the ICS examination was held in India as well as in London, first at Allahabad.
5. The Lee Commission (1924), the Royal Commission on the Superior Civil Services in India, recommended that within fifteen years half the ICS should be Indian, with Europeans and Indians recruited directly in equal numbers and the rest of the Indian share filled by promotion from the provincial services. It recommended that recruitment to the services in the transferred fields pass to the provinces, and that the Public Service Commission provided for in the Government of India Act, 1919 be set up.
6. The Public Service Commission was established on 1 October 1926 under Sir Ross Barker. The Government of India Act, 1935 provided for a Federal Public Service Commission and provincial commissions, and the federal commission became the Union Public Service Commission under the Constitution.

The record supports the view that Indianisation was slow but steady. Each step followed political pressure, each was hedged by safeguards for European officers, and parity was promised in 1924 for a date fifteen years away. But the direction never reversed, and the machinery built along the way, the provincial services, the examination in India and the public service commissions, is what the republic took over when the Indian Administrative Service replaced the ICS.

Post-Independence Development

Independence changed the task without changing the instrument. The administration was asked to take on planned economic development, the delivery of welfare and social services, the integration of the princely states, the resettlement of refugees, the conduct of universal-franchise elections, and the implementation of land reform and social legislation aimed at altering the society the administration had previously only policed.

The Constitution supplied the framework of values, and developmental plans were framed and implemented to address poverty and secure equality for all groups. Administrative reform was felt to be necessary for social and economic development, and the process of reform has continued since independence without interruption.

The Immediate Tasks

• Integration of the princely states. Over five hundred states had to be brought into the Union and their separate administrative systems assimilated to the provincial pattern, which involved extending the all-India services, the revenue system and the judicial structure into territories that had known none of them.
• Partition and resettlement, which imposed on a newly formed administration the movement and rehabilitation of millions, a task of logistics and welfare for which its regulatory training had not prepared it.
• Planning. The Planning Commission, established in 1950, created a parallel apparatus of plan formulation, resource allocation and evaluation alongside the constitutional machinery of finance, and the relationship between the two was never fully settled, which is why its replacement in 2015 is a live topic rather than a closed one.
• The public sector, with departmental undertakings, statutory corporations and government companies created to occupy the commanding heights, each requiring forms of control and accountability that the departmental model did not supply.
• Universal franchise elections, conducted by the same district machinery that collected revenue, which is the single clearest demonstration of the inherited apparatus succeeding at a task it was never designed for.

Continuity and Change

What continued: the district collectorate, the all-India services, the secretariat, the file, the rules of business, the financial and audit system, and the basic federal design inherited from 1935.

What changed: the introduction of planning machinery and a vast apparatus of development departments and public enterprises; the creation of the Indian Administrative Service in place of the ICS, with constitutional protection and a different mandate; the arrival of political executives answerable to an electorate; reservation in recruitment to make the service representative; and, from 1992, a constitutional tier of local government.

The assessment that follows is the one the topic exists to reach: the structures were retained and the purposes were replaced, and much of what is criticised in Indian administration is the friction between the two. An apparatus whose habits are regulatory has been asked to be developmental, and reform has mostly attempted to change the habits while leaving the apparatus in place.

Administrative Reform Commissions

The Early Reports

• N. Gopalaswamy Ayyangar (1949) suggested improvements in the methods of transacting government business and the creation of an Organisation and Method division at the central level.
• A.D. Gorwala (April 1951) held that a clean, efficient and impartial administration was vital to the success of democratic planning, and recommended reorganising the administrative machinery for greater speed, effectiveness and responsiveness. On administrative delay he proposed more junior officers and fewer clerks in administrative departments. His linking of integrity to the success of planning, rather than to propriety alone, is the argument that later development administration would restate.
• Paul H. Appleby, in reports submitted in 1953 and 1956, urged reform through the establishment of an O&M organisation in the Union government and an Institute of Public Administration, stressed the importance of satisfying citizens' needs, and made suggestions for improving the record and filing system. The Indian Institute of Public Administration followed from his recommendation.
• Ashok Chandra (1954) proposed measures to remove delays in the execution of projects.
• T.T. Krishnamachari reported on the training of IAS officers and the improvement of state administration.
• K. Santhanam (1964) addressed corruption, and his committee produced the Central Vigilance Commission and the framework of modern anti-corruption law.

The First Administrative Reforms Commission

Set up in January 1966 under Morarji Desai and then K. Hanumanthaiya, the first ARC examined the machinery of government and its procedures, financial and personnel administration, the machinery for planning, centre-state relations, state and district administration, and the redress of citizens' grievances. Its most consequential recommendations were the Lokpal and Lokayuktas, the gradual infusion of specialists into the administrative services to meet the technological challenge, and the strengthening of O&M and of the district machinery. It produced some twenty reports, of which a substantial part was accepted and a smaller part implemented.

The Committees Between

• Kothari Committee (1976) on recruitment, which reshaped the civil services examination into its preliminary, main and interview structure.
• Ashok Mehta Committee (1977) on panchayati raj institutions, which recommended a two-tier structure with the mandal panchayat as the base and an open role for political parties, and which anticipated the constitutional amendments of 1992.
• Sarkaria Commission (1983) on centre-state relations.
• Economic Administrative Reforms Commission under L.K. Jha (1983), which urged far greater accountability, with performance valued above mere adherence to rules. The phrase is the whole of the reform agenda in a line.
• G.V.K. Rao Committee (1985) on the administration of rural development, which found that development administration had become divorced from the district machinery and recommended strengthening the district as the unit of development planning.

The Planning Commission, the Estimates Committee and the Committee on Public Undertakings also pressed modern techniques of financial, project and human resource management upon public organisations.

The 1990s Turn

A significant shift in the development paradigm occurred in 1990. The structural adjustment programme introduced new economic policies, and these could not be implemented well without corresponding change in the administrative system, of which decentralisation was the principal requirement. The 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments followed, strengthening panchayati raj bodies and municipalities. Administrative reform thus became a condition of economic reform rather than a separate exercise, which is the relationship that had been missing from the earlier reports.

The Second Administrative Reforms Commission

Constituted in 2005 under Veerappa Moily, the second ARC submitted fifteen reports amounting to a detailed blueprint for revamping the Indian administrative system, covering among other subjects the right to information, unlocking human capital, crisis management, ethics in governance, local governance, capacity building for conflict resolution, public order, financial management, the refurbishing of personnel administration, e-governance, and the organisational structure of the Government of India.

Its characteristic recommendations connect directly to the rest of this paper: competition and choice in service delivery; performance-based rather than seniority-based advancement, with training linked to promotion; an ethics framework and a strengthened anti-corruption architecture; citizen-centric administration through charters and grievance redress; and devolution to local bodies with funds, functions and functionaries together.

Why Administrative Reform Under-delivers

• Reform is recommended by outsiders and implemented by insiders. The service asked to reorganise itself is the body whose position the reorganisation would alter, and it controls the pace of implementation.
• Political ownership is episodic. Administrative reform yields returns beyond an electoral cycle and imposes costs within one.
• The diagnosis repeats. Gorwala in 1951 and the second ARC in 2005 identify substantially the same defects, delay, over-centralisation, procedure displacing purpose, weak accountability, which indicates the causes are structural rather than remediable by further recommendation.
• Reform targets structures where the binding constraint is incentives. Reorganising a department changes nothing if promotion still follows seniority, transfer remains a political instrument and appraisal does not discriminate.
• Federalism limits reach. Most administration that citizens encounter is state administration, and central commissions can recommend to the states but cannot bind them.

The conclusion worth carrying into an answer is that India has not suffered from a shortage of administrative diagnosis. It has produced an unusually rich body of it over seventy-five years, and the gap between the diagnosis and the condition is itself the finding: an administration capable of commissioning excellent reports on its own defects, and structurally insulated from acting on them, is exhibiting precisely the formalism that the comparative literature attributes to transitional systems.