This book is about public administration in India, which is often synonymous with the role and performance of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). The author stresses the indispensability of the civil service in a democratic polity like India and the decisive role it plays in assisting with the social and economic development of the country. He also examines the corruption in the bureaucracy and the question of ethics and morality and analyses elaborate and competitive recruitment process of the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) of India.
The Palgrave Handbook of the Public Servant examines what it means to be a public servant in today’s world(s) where globalisation and neoliberalism have proliferated the number of actors who contribute to the public purpose sector and created new spaces that public servants now operate in. It considers how different scholarly approaches can contribute to a better understanding of the identities, motivations, values, roles, skills, positions and futures for the public servant, and how scholarly knowledge can be informed by and translated into value for practice. The book combines academic contributions with those from practitioners so that key lessons may be synthesised and translated into the context of the public servant.
While a growing private sector and a vibrant civil society can help compensate for the shortcomings of India’s public sector, the state is—and will remain—indispensable in delivering basic governance. In Rethinking Public Institutions in India, distinguished political and economic thinkers critically assess a diverse array of India’s core federal institutions, from the Supreme Court and Parliament to the Election Commission and the civil services. Relying on interdisciplinary approaches and decades of practitioner experience, this volume interrogates the capacity of India’s public sector to navigate the far-reaching transformations the country is experiencing. An insightful introduction to the functioning of Indian democracy, it offers a roadmap for carrying out fundamental reforms that will be necessary for India to build a reinvigorated state for the twenty-first century.
This pioneering independent effort to assess the state of India's public services from a user's perspective brings together the responses of citizens from 37,000 rural and urban households on the delivery, quality, and responsiveness of public services. While the state's monitoring of service delivery seldom goes beyond tracking public expenditure and physical outputs, this study fills that gap and provides unique benchmarks with respect to five basic services: drinking water, primary health care, primary education, public distribution of food, and public transportation across the major states.
Public sector reform has moved on apace since the first of the Commonwealth Public Service Country Profile Series was launched in 1995 when the principles of New Public Management (NPM) were in an early stage of adoption. Since then, the various civil services described in the series have undergone radical change in scope, organization and approach rendering a revision timely. Now up dated and completely revised, these re-issued Country Profiles continue to be an accessible and valuable source of reference which attempt to both describe and analyze the often tumultuous and controversial public sector reforms which have taken place in contributing countries since 1995. Practicing bureaucrats, diplomats, political and academic audiences will find these new books invaluable in benchmarking best practice in public sector reform across Commonwealth member countries.
Why are inter-state differences in human development in India so high? What explains regional patterns where overall the southern region has some of the best human development outcomes in the country while the states in the northern ‘heartland’ have the worst? In addressing these important questions, this volume provides a detailed analysis of health outcomes in India, especially its effects on women. It offers insights into how multiple factors affecting human development, in particular health, play out differently in various socio-cultural and economic contexts. This book will interest scholars and researchers of sociology, development studies, gender studies, economics, public policy as well as general readers.
This book presents the first comprehensive review of all major government-supported health insurance schemes in India and their potential for contributing to the achievement of universal coverage in India are discussed.
A state-of-the-art, one-stop resource, Public Administration in South Asia: India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan examines public administration issues and advances in the Indian subcontinent. The book fulfills a critical need. These nations have the largest public administration programs in South Asia, yet existing knowledge on them is fragmented at best. Bringing together leading scholars from these countries, this book provides both an insider perspective and a scholarly look at the challenges and accomplishments in the region. Focusing on the machinery of government, the book explores questions such as: What is the history of public administration development? How are major decisions made in the agencies? Why are anti-corruption efforts so much a challenge? What is the significance of intergovernmental relations? What is the success of administrative reform? What are examples of successful social development programs? How successful is e-government, and what are its challenges? Why is civil service reform difficult to achieve? How is freedom of information being used as a means to combat corruption and invoke grassroots activism? What can be learned from the successes and failures? While public administration practice and education have become considerably professionalized in the last decade, a sufficiently in-depth and well-rounded reference on public administration in these countries is sorely lacking. Most available books tackle only aspects of public administration such as administrative reforms, civil service, economic developments, or public policy, and are country specific. None provide the in-depth analysis of the sphere of public action in South Asia found in this book. It supplies an understanding of how public administration can be either the source of, or solution to, so many of the problems and achievements in the Indian subcontinent.
Why do some governments improve public services more effectively than others? Through the investigation of a new era of administrative reform, in which digital technologies may be used to facilitate citizens' access to the state, Jennifer Bussell's analysis provides unanticipated insights into this fundamental question. In contrast to factors such as economic development or electoral competition, this study highlights the importance of access to rents, which can dramatically shape the opportunities and threats of reform to political elites. Drawing on a sub-national analysis of twenty Indian states, a field experiment, statistical modeling, case studies, interviews of citizens, bureaucrats and politicians, and comparative data from South Africa and Brazil, Bussell shows that the extent to which politicians rely on income from petty and grand corruption is closely linked to variation in the timing, management and comprehensiveness of reforms.
