A wide-ranging chat with Dr Uday Balakrishnan (retired from the Indian Postal Service as a Member of its Board), currently teaching governance at IISc Bangalore, who has seen the beast from the inside, warts and all. We discuss:
Can the bureaucracy be reformed? What are its biggest problems and sins? Is it attitude, perhaps unchanged from James Mill’s time, ie 1817? Is it the way they are recruited and trained? Does the problem lie in the way there’s a brutal hierarchy in place where lesser babus are humiliated and treated as sub-humans while the elites play God? What about the way babudom is not accountable for results achieved (or not)? Why do they have no skin in the game? How can evaluation be made more rigorous? Do they stick up for each other to the detriment of the national interest? What about all the little jaunts to Harvard etc that they go on: are these useful to India or to someone else? Are they giving away Big Data about India to possibly malign outsiders? A no-holds-barred critique of what’s good and what’s bad with India’s fabled babus.
Can babudom be salvaged? The answer: a big ‘Maybe’.
And here’s a companion look at the Judiciary, from 2018: Can We Fix The Deeply Troubled Judiciary?
Excerpts from Uday’s Bio:
Dr. Uday Balakrishnan belongs to the 1975 batch of the Indian Postal Service the world’s most extensive. He has worked across India in areas of logistics, banking, insurance, financial inclusion, child, women and unorganized labour, human resource development, as well as vigilance and anticorruption in the postal services and in the larger Government of India.
He has headed two large staff training centres and also served as the administrative head of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) –Bengaluru. To pursue his other interests, Dr. Balakrishnan retired voluntarily in 2010 as Member of the Postal Services Board & Chairman of the Investment Board.
Dr Balakrishnan’s academic interests include modern history, International Relations and public policy. Dr. Balakrishnan has been a visiting fellow at prestigious institutions like the Centre for Contemporary Studies-IISc, National Institute of Advanced Study (NIAS) and the Central European University (CEU) Budapest.
Dr. Balakrishnan has been teaching a popular public policy and contemporary history course, developed by him, titled ‘Introduction to Governance in India,’ for undergraduate science students at IISc since 2014. It is the only one of its kind in India.
Dr. Balakirshnan is a prolific columnist and reviewer of books for ‘The Hindu,’ and the ‘BusinessLine’.
Ep. 24: Dr Uday Balakrishnan on what ails Governance in India. What can we do to fix it?