Why Indian Governance Depends on Individuals
A recurring observation among administrators, researchers, and citizens engaged with Indian governance is that outcomes depend heavily on who is in charge. A district performs well under one Collector and slides under the next. A welfare scheme delivers under one state secretary and stalls under another. A court order gets implemented when a particular official is in post and lies dormant when they leave. This person-dependence — the tendency for governance quality to fluctuate with the qualities of specific individuals rather than operating consistently through institutional design — is widely documented and widely lamented. It is not a feature of unusually poor governance; it is a structural characteristic of a system that has historically under-invested in institutional design and over-relied on individual discretion.
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| Representational Image: Why Indian Governance Depends on Individuals |
Essential Context
- Carnegie
Endowment (2017) documented that India's public sector workforce declined
from 19.1 million in 1991 to 17.9 million in 2011 even as the population
grew from 846 million to 1.2 billion; the combined IAS and IPS cadre
strength was below 11,000 in 2010, with a 28% vacancy rate.
- Academic
research by Akshay Mangla, published in Asian Survey, found that variation
in primary education outcomes between Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand —
states with similar administrative structures — was explained
substantially by differences in bureaucratic norms and the professional
culture of individual officers, rather than by resources alone.
- The
CEGIS Foundation identifies personnel management as one of four core
functions where state capacity varies most consequentially, noting that
outcome measurement and individual performance incentives are
systematically weak across Indian government.
- Research
by Karthik Muralidharan, as summarised by Ideas for India, frames the
problem as a misalignment between what individual politicians and
bureaucrats are incentivised to do and what institutions require of them
for sustained capacity building — a structural mismatch rather than a
moral failure.
- Rajiv
Gandhi, speaking in 1985, described the District Magistrate or Collector
as "the government as far as the people are concerned with a capital
'G'" — a formulation that captures both the enormous concentrated
authority of individual officers and the institutional thinness that makes
this concentration necessary.
How It Works in Practice
1. Institutions substitute for rules in high-discretion
systems: Where institutional design is weak and rules are numerous but
unevenly enforced, the individual officer's judgment, integrity, and energy
effectively substitute for institutional guarantees. A principled officer can
produce good outcomes in a weak system; a compromised or disengaged officer can
hollow out a formally strong one.
2. Personal relationships substitute for standard
processes: In many administrative domains, the outcome a citizen or
business receives depends on their access to and relationship with the relevant
official. Those who know the officer, who can reach them through trusted
intermediaries, or who have political access receive different treatment than
those who do not. This relationship-dependence is not necessarily corrupt — it
reflects the information asymmetries and personal accountability that
individual-dependent governance produces.
3. Crisis management depends on individual leadership:
During disasters, pandemics, and security incidents, India's administrative
system activates primarily through individual District Collectors coordinating
across departments. Kerala's widely cited success in managing the early phase
of the COVID-19 pandemic was attributed in part to decisive and coordinated
district leadership — an outcome replicable only where capable individuals are
in post.
4. Political assignments determine which individuals
reach which posts: Transfer and posting decisions are the primary mechanism
through which political leadership shapes which individuals govern specific
territories. An administration that wants a particular outcome in a district
will post an officer it trusts; an outgoing government's officers will be
transferred when a new government forms. Individual quality and individual
political alignment both shape who governs where.
5. Accountability is personal, not systemic: When
things go wrong — a scheme fails, a disaster is mismanaged, a procurement fraud
is discovered — accountability in the Indian system typically attaches to the
specific officer deemed responsible, rather than to the institutional design
failure that enabled the problem. This personalises both praise and blame,
reinforcing the individual-dependence pattern.
What People Often Misunderstand
- Person-dependence
is not simply a human quality problem: It is a structural outcome of
institutional under-design; improving governance requires building systems
that produce consistent outcomes regardless of which individual officer is
assigned, not simply recruiting better individuals.
- Individual
quality is not randomly distributed: Which individuals reach which
positions is determined by the transfer system, which is politically
managed; individual quality in governance is therefore not independent of
political conditions.
- Lateral
entry is a partial response: Introducing domain specialists from
outside the civil service into senior government posts — as the Union
government has done on a limited basis since 2018 — directly addresses the
specialisation deficit but not the broader institutional design weaknesses
that make individual quality so determinative.
- Well-performing
states have reduced person-dependence in some areas: States with
standardised scheme monitoring, digital dashboards, and outcome-linked
reporting — Andhra Pradesh in some social sectors, Gujarat in industrial
administration — have reduced but not eliminated individual-dependence in
specific domains.
- Citizens
know which officials to approach: In a person-dependent system,
effective citizens and businesses invest in mapping the social landscape
of official relationships — knowing who controls which decision, and how
to reach them — as a core governance navigation skill.
What Changes Over Time
Mission Karmayogi — the National Programme for Civil
Services Capacity Building, launched in 2020 — seeks to shift civil service
development from seniority-based progression to role-specific competency
building, addressing the specialisation deficit at scale. The iGOT (Integrated
Government Online Training) platform is its digital delivery mechanism. Results
are not yet systematically evaluated. Digital monitoring systems — real-time
dashboards tracking MGNREGA payments, PM-KISAN disbursements, and scheme delivery
rates — create a layer of institutional accountability above the individual
officer level, making performance visible to higher levels in ways that
historically required personal investigation.
Sources and Further Reading
- Carnegie
Endowment — Weak Public Institutions Behind India's Low State Capacity: https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2017/05/weak-public-institutions-behind-indias-low-state-capacity
- Ideas
for India — Building State Capacity for Development: https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/governance/building-state-capacity-for-accelerating-development-through-effective-governance.html
- IDinsight
— Strengthening State Capacity in India: https://www.idinsight.org/project/strengthening-state-capacity-to-improve-service-delivery-for-citizens/
- CEGIS
Foundation — State Capacity and Governance: https://cegis.org
- Mangla,
Akshay — Bureaucratic Norms and State Capacity in India, Asian Survey: https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/Asian_Survey_5505_03_Mangla_219b4d54-2a4f-4a43-a0ab-d632628f8fae.pdf