Bureaucracies Under Trial

Every year, lakhs of young people sit for the Union Public Service Commission’s Civil Services Examination in order to be considered for one of the most sought government jobs in India: the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). Hundreds of them, ostensibly among the best pupils in the country, qualify for the difficult competition, and the results make national news.The reaction of each successful candidate to reporters’ queries is more or less the same: “I want to serve the country. I want to work for the development of the common people, especially those on the margins.”

In a confession before the Enforcement Directorate (ED), the Chartered Accountant of the recently arrested IAS officer Pooja Singhal, Suman Kumar, on Thursday said that out of the Rs 17.49 crore recovered by the probe agency in connection with the MGNREGA money fraud case, the majority of it belonged to Singhal.Obviously, Singhal’s isn’t an independent instance of defilement among top government authorities. In 2010, strikes by Personal Duty division authorities on an IAS couple, Arvind Joshi and Tinu Joshi, having a place with Madhya Pradesh unit, had uncovered properties worth an incredible Rs 360 crore. However, such strikes are not many and in the middle between.We acquired the common administrations from the English. Our most memorable State leader Jawaharlal Nehru was confident that the administrations would contribute incredibly towards building the beginning country one step at a time. He depicted the common administrations as the “steel outline” of Free India.

Notwithstanding, while we frequently run over news about lesser state government authorities getting “found in the act” by carefulness division, we don’t frequently hear something very similar about top all India framework officials. That is on the grounds that state carefulness divisions go through a complicated interaction to test charges of defilement against officials of IAS, Indian Police Administration and Indian Timberland Administration in light of specific regulatory insusceptibility.To be sure, there have been worries over the descending winding of the IAS into shortcoming and debasement. Numerous specialists figure it ought to be destroyed in light of the fact that one can’t be a specialist of each and every field — be it income, advancement, wellbeing, farming, industry, etc — just by clearing a test during the twenties. Some have likewise upheld the sidelong passage of specialists of explicit fields into the public authority at mid and high levels as an option for better administration.

By Anisha Ganguly

Edited by Subhechcha Ganguly