We knew it all along, of course, but now it’s official:
India’s bureaucrats are the WORST in Asia. Read the news here.
The rankings, from most efficient to least efficient bureaucracies, are as follows:
Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam, China, Philippines, Indonesia and India.
There they are, the IAS & Co., right at the bottom of the heap.
And to think that the ICS in British times was one of the world’s best. What did the ICS do that was so different?
For one: they did not do too many things. As Philip Mason says in The Men Who Ruled India:
“The ICS focused on roads, railways, bridges and canals – this was the mixture, very good for the child, to be given firmly and taken without fuss.”
Note how roads come first.
The IAS chose a different ideology – to do anything and everything, from feeding the poor to producing steel. And they abandoned their core tasks – roads, law & order, and justice, including, especially, accurate land records.
The ICS was trained in Haileybury – on the principles of classical liberalism.
The IAS academy in Mussoorie still clings to a garbled Marxist-Ricardianism.
So whaddya expect?
Anyway, I am extremely glad that the IAS knows they have hit the bottom. This should prompt them to re-think their political economy.
Why should classical liberalism produce a good bureaucracy? The answer to this question was most eloquently provided by Frederic Bastiat, who wrote that the ideas he espoused would NOT make The State weak. On the contrary, a State that performed limited functions would always be strong, because the people would not clamour to it for anything and everything. Such a government would have just a few tasks to perform, and if it did these satisfactorily, the people would have little to complain about, and the personnel of the State would occupy a high position in the estimation of the public.
This requires an intellectual revolution, which should begin at the IAS academy.
That is their only was out.
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