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2. Organisation Through Neglect: Understanding Field Administration in India
- Author:
- Rashmi Sharma
- Publication Date:
- 03-2023
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for Policy Research, India
- Abstract:
- This paper analyses the structure and processes of field administration in India and matches these with the outcomes on the ground. It highlights features of the administrative structure, human resources, and organisational culture that result in the sub-optimal delivery of social services and policy implementation. Recognizing the importance of historical antecedents, the paper provides a brief account of how field administration has developed over time. Subsequently, it presents the findings of a case study of a district situated in Madhya Pradesh. This is followed by a delineation of the key areas for reform and some possible strategies, though these need to be formulated after rigorous debate. The paper traces the roots of the present-day field administration to the colonial era, when the existing decentralised and diffused field administration system was changed to achieve the government’s goals to maximise revenue from land and forests and maintain order. The district became the key administrative unit in the field, and the district collector (DC) the overall administrative head. After Independence, government goals shifted dramatically, and socio-economic development became a central concern. However, the basic administrative structure was retained, while several departmentalorganisations were added.
- Topic:
- Governance, Colonialism, Human Resources, and Administration
- Political Geography:
- South Asia and India
3. Mirroring its British masters: state and outsourced terrorism against the Maoist insurgency
- Author:
- Felipe Costa Lima
- Publication Date:
- 04-2022
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Conjuntura Austral: Journal of the Global South
- Institution:
- Conjuntura Austral: Journal of the Global South
- Abstract:
- The Indian state has been adopting controversial policies for countering the Maoist insurgency. Even worse, this behaviour seems to mirror British colonial attitudes against India’s population at some level. Consequently, this article attempts to understand this probable ‘paradoxical’ conduct. With the support of the post-structuralist theory, I discuss state and outsourced terrorist practices of the Indian state apparatus against this insurgency. To reach this goal, first, I try to explicate the concept of state terrorism and its application in India. Then, I analyse the historical development of the Maoist movement and India’s concrete policies of state and outsourced terrorism against this counter-hegemonic movement. I believe the British Raj’s colonial practices have had a deep dialectical influence on India’s state apparatus and major political parties to date. So, this inquiry may clarify the persistence of colonial practices within India.
- Topic:
- Terrorism, Insurgency, Colonialism, State Sponsored Terrorism, and Maoism
- Political Geography:
- United Kingdom, South Asia, and India
4. Debates on Administrative Reform in India: Expertise
- Author:
- Karnamadakala Rahul Sharma, Aditya Unnikrishnan, and Sonakshi Sharma
- Publication Date:
- 03-2022
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for Policy Research, India
- Abstract:
- Historical accounts show that the education and training of the colonial civil servant was purposely made non-specialised. Autobiographical narratives of ICS officers who received their training at Halieybury (England), reveal that the quality of education was low and students were tested on their knowledge of languages such as Persian and Sanskrit, which had little practical use once they arrived in India. After the Service was made merit-based in 1853, officer training included more practical aspects such as attending court proceedings and writing reports, however, it did not involve in-depth specialisation in any one field. The non-specialised character of training and the expertise gained, were well suited to the nature of the polity that required district officials to hold multiple portfolios. Earl Cornwallis, the third Governor General of Bengal who is credited with making extensive changes in the civil service from 1793 to 1859, tried to differentiate the judicial and supervisory functions for land revenue assessment and collection. He created the office of the District Collector as a supervisory role to oversee collection of revenue from landholders, whereas the administration of law was to be the responsibility of a civil judge and magistrate. However, after the annexation of Awadh and the territorial expansion of the company, it proved impossible for a District Collector to separate their judicial and supervisory functions, particularly in the newly acquired territories (Cohn, 1987, p. 509). The Indian Administrative Service (IAS) we have today inherited this generalist notion of the civil servant from its predecessor, the ICS. Post-independence, even though different services were created to undertake specific responsibilities, the imagination of the expertise of the IAS officer continues to be organised around the principles of the colonial civil service. This has led many to argue that the skills and knowledge of the IAS were unsuited to the nature of polity and demands of governance (Administrative Reforms Commission, 1969). More than fifty years later, the same tension concerning the personnel involved in governance and the skills/ knowledge required for these roles persists. As a result, two fundamental questions are central to the debates on expertise in the country’s government. First: What kind of knowledge and expertise is most useful for administrators? This debate has frequently been framed as a choice between generalists and specialists. And second: How can this expertise be embedded in administration, particularly at senior levels? Two kinds of solutions dominate this discourse, one where internal mechanisms are restructured to make best use of existing internal talent (via domain assignment) and the other involving the recruitment of external experts (via lateral entry). This working paper delves into the detailed discussion on these two questions by reviewing the First and Second Administrative Reforms Commissions (ARC), Central Pay Commission Reports, the Surinder Nath Committee report, Sarkaria Commission report, NITI Three Year Action Agenda and Parliamentary Standing Committee reports. The first section of the working paper attempts to present a discursive overview of the generalist-specialist binary. The next two sections, on Domain Assignment and Lateral Entry respectively, explain the dominant approaches that have been considered to address the expertise problem. 2. Generalists vs Specialists: origins and tensions As with any job, there is consensus within the reform discourse that bureaucrats must display a high degree of ability and expertise. However, there are opposing views on what constitutes this expertise at the highest levels of the bureaucracy. These differences have frequently been expressed in the language of ‘generalists’ and ‘specialists’ partially as a result of the structure of India’s Civil Service which consists of generalist and specialist services as described in the next sub-section. The next two subsections throw light on the evolution of reform thinking on the kind of expertise needed—from narrow technical knowledge to domain competence, and eventually towards a more complex understanding that expertise is gained on the job that cannot be achieved through appropriate training alone. In the timeline on page 6, we present the sequence of events and reports of the last few decades that we consider salient for understanding the debate on generalist versus specialist roles. The timeline offers a bird’s eye view of reform trajectory when read alongside the detailed information provided in the following sections.
- Topic:
- History, Reform, Colonialism, and Administration
- Political Geography:
- South Asia and India
5. Debates on Administrative Reform in India: Training
- Author:
- Sonakshi Sharma, Aditya Unnikrishnan, and Karnamadakala Rahul Sharma
- Publication Date:
- 03-2022
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for Policy Research, India
- Abstract:
- Since Independence, the government’s approach to training the IAS has undergone a sea of change. The IAS has evolved “from being a postcolonial civil service… to one that is rooted in the empirical realities of a developing and resurgent India” (Kiran Aggarwal Committee, 2014, p.1). Training programmes for the IAS have shifted their focus from regulation to socioeconomic development in keeping with the new demands faced by governance and administration (Second Administrative Reforms Commission, 2008). In spite of these changes, there remain similarities with the colonial civil service. Like the ICS, the IAS is a high-functional generalist service tasked with handling a variety of responsibilities. Reform committees continue to express concerns that trainees do not attach adequate value to the training process (Second Administrative Reforms Commission, 2008). Training is still expected to create strong bonds between officers and establish a camaraderie. Most importantly, the central principle remains the same; a merit-based process is used to select young people with little or no experience in governance and place them in positions of great responsibility. This kind of system inevitably relies heavily on training to impart skills. Better training, both at the formative and mid-career stages, is expected to bridge the “wide chasm between public expectation and service delivery” (Kiran Aggarwal Committee, 2014, p. 3). For this reason, it is vital to examine the history of reform debates and conversations on the subject. Tracing the evolution of these reform threads will better equip us to analyse current and future reform measures by understanding which problems are being addressed and how. To this end, this working paper closely reads the following: the Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC) reports, Central Pay Commission (CPC) reports, and reports produced by reform commissions like the Alagh Committee, Kiran Aggarwal Committee, Hota Committee, Kothari Committee, Yugandhar Committee, VT Krishnamachari Committee and the Surinder Nath Committee. Apart from this, the working paper also draws on theNational Training Policy, 1996 and2012, and documents on Mission Karmayogi that reflect the government’s vision for IAS training. This paper begins with a short description of the current training format and the IAS ecosystem. This is followed by an analysis of the three streams that dominate reform thinking on IAS training: the strategy, structure and content of training; the role of and need for incentives in training programmes, and the institutional apparatus in place to operationalise training programmes.
- Topic:
- History, Reform, Colonialism, Training, Civil Servants, and Administration
- Political Geography:
- South Asia and India
6. Impact of Colonial Institutions on Economic Growth and Development in India: Evidence from Night Lights Data
- Author:
- Priyaranjan Jha and Karan Talathi
- Publication Date:
- 09-2021
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- The Cato Institute
- Abstract:
- Many cross‐country studies find that quality of historical institutions is a major cause of disparity in present‐day economic development as measured by income per capita. Due to the unavailability of data on a comprehensive measure of development such as per capita income, studies examining the role of historical institutions on development at the subnational levels use alternate proxies of economic well‐being in their analysis. We examine the long‐term effects of British colonial institutions on overall economic development within India using satellite night lights data.
- Topic:
- Development, Economic Growth, Colonialism, Economic Policy, and Institutions
- Political Geography:
- South Asia and India
7. The Interactions of International Relations: Racism, Colonialism, Producer-Centred Research
- Author:
- Deep K. Datta-Ray
- Publication Date:
- 07-2021
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy and Peace
- Institution:
- Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research
- Abstract:
- The racial hierarchy underscoring colonialism persists, organises core-periphery interactions and so undermines International Relations’ (IR’s) purpose of accounting and explaining to mitigate violence. Despite IR’s awareness of its colonialism, it reconstitutes in the hermeneutic’s deductive and inductive method via aphasia (calculated forgetting) about its heuristic: diplomacy. The result, analytic-violence or the core’s heuristic corrupting interaction with the periphery. Yet, its evasiveness testifies to a meaningfulness beyond IR’s hermeneutic. Irretrievably corrupted by its heuristic, IR’s hermeneutic is ejected for an altogether new hermeneutic: Producer-Centred Research (PCR). Eschewing deduction and induction, and so colonialism, PCR initiates with abduction or a problem arising from theory and practice to resolve it in terms of rationality because of its, and the problem’s, significance. Changing “rationality” to “rationalities” registers the core’s rationality as colonialism while preventing it from contaminating PCR’s collection and assessment of peripheral practices to determine if they cohere into another rationality. Moreover, treating peripheral practitioners authoritatively, as capable of rationalising themselves and thus equal to rationality, further protects PCR from aphasia. Verifying efficacy shows PCR’s decolonisation of the hermeneutic is not entirely replicated externally, amongst IR scholars. The core engages PCR, but it incites violence in the periphery which defends rationality and so is colonialism’s bastion, now.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Diplomacy, Colonialism, Eurocentrism, Racism, and Hermeneutics
- Political Geography:
- India and Global Focus
8. Kanak Mukherjee (1921-2005): Women of Struggle, Women in Struggle
- Author:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Publication Date:
- 03-2021
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Abstract:
- The twentieth century was marked by national liberation struggles that emerged in Africa and Asia, as well as in Latin America where neo-colonial structures had subordinated the formally independent countries. The achievements of the Russian Revolution in 1917 inspired the peasantry and the working class across the Global South. The fight for equality and liberation under the leadership of working people are ongoing in the anti-imperialist struggles of our time. Women, in a myriad of ways, powerfully shaped and continue to shape all of these struggles. In the Women of Struggle, Women in Struggle series of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we will present the stories of women in struggle who contributed not only to the wider arena of politics, but who also pioneered the establishment of women’s organisations, opening up paths of feminist resistance and struggle throughout the twentieth century. Praxis, as a knowledge of theory and of organisational methods of struggle as they change and respond to history, gives sustenance to ongoing struggles to face oppression. As militants, we study the diverse organisational methods of these women not only to better understand their political contributions, but also to inspire us as we build the organisations necessary for our fight against oppression and exploitation today. In this second study, we discuss the life and legacy of Kanak Mukherjee, a fighter for the people and people’s struggles who was born in undivided Bengal, India, in 1921. The rich trajectory of her activism teaches us about the history of women organising in local, national, and international struggles that linked women’s rights to anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles throughout the twentieth century. In Mukherjee’s own words: ‘We cannot see the question of women’s rights in isolation. The roots of women’s subjugation and the discriminations against them lie in class exploitation’.
- Topic:
- Education, Imperialism, Colonialism, Feminism, Biography, and Gender
- Political Geography:
- India and Asia
9. The Farmers’ Revolt in India
- Author:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Publication Date:
- 06-2021
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Abstract:
- Despite India’s achievement of a certain level of self-sufficiency in food production over the decades, the chronic agrarian crisis, often manifested in the suicides of farmers, persists. This dossier traces the causes of this crisis, which go back to the days of British colonial rule and to the choices made by the Indian state at various points since independence.
- Topic:
- Agriculture, Food, Food Security, Colonialism, and Farming
- Political Geography:
- India and Asia
10. Kashmir: A Case for Self-Determination
- Author:
- Hafsa Kanjwal
- Publication Date:
- 09-2019
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Brown Journal of World Affairs
- Abstract:
- On 5 August 2019, the Indian government unilaterally changed the legal status of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, undermining its own constitutional process and completely annexing a territory that remains disputed in the international arena. In a statement to the Indian parliament, the Indian Home Minister announced the abrogation of Kashmir’s special status enshrined in Article 370 of the Indian constitution, as well as the bifurcation of the state into two Union Territories to be directly governed by the central government. Since then, the government has placed Indian-occupied Kashmir on lockdown. Despite restrictions on the movement of reporters and human rights observers and a clampdown on communication infrastructure (including the internet and some phone services), there have been reports of widespread human rights abuses including extrajudicial detentions (including of minors), torture, sexual violence, and lack of access to basic medical and healthcare services.
- Topic:
- Post Colonialism, Territorial Disputes, Self Determination, Colonialism, and Empire
- Political Geography:
- India, East Asia, and Kashmir