By Anwesh Satpathy
Rule by bureaucracy and its consequences have been a disaster for Indian society. From the 5,76,793 candidates who appeared in the UPSC 2025 examination, 958 were successful. This puts the success rate at 0.16%. In other words, you are as likely to succeed in the UPSC exams as you are to be struck by lightning in your lifetime.
Yet, there are entire companies, i.e. coaching centres, dedicated to selling you the UPSC dream. They convince you that even if you don’t get in, the lessons you’ll learn will somehow make you a better human being. “UPSC Aspirants” has become a respected title for a large number of our youth. The problem with Indian bureaucracy is not these “aspirants” but larger systemic failures.
How does a bureaucracy that declines in absolute numbers every succeeding decade, with a sorting mechanism that is so selective, become synonymous with inefficiency and corruption?
There were institutional mechanisms that incentivised rent seeking at every possible stage. The Indian state, from its very inception, was intoxicated with the idea of central planning. It is ironic that the years when our political actors had the most faith in the state’s emancipatory potential were also the years when the state was the most inefficient. This is best explained by the Rajiv Gandhi dictum—for every rupee the centre sends, the beneficiary receives 15 paise. Even as the state created lofty policies for the most disadvantaged, it failed to deliver basic needs.
As Arvind Subramanian and Devesh Kapur have pointed out, the instability at the local level was caused by the state’s instrumentalisation of transfer. Civil servants on average last less than a year at any post at the local level. Only around 10% civil servants last more than 3 years. This leads bureaucrats to prioritise short-term quick fixes over long-term reforms, which they’ll almost certainly have no way of seeing through.
Those posted at remote regions are incentivised to resort to corruption to ensure transfer to a more amenable district. The money for such corruption comes from the local population in return for providing them with basic amenities, which is ostensibly their right. Transfers also serve as a way of punishing bureaucrats seen to be antagonistic to either the state or to influential corporations and contractors. This is far more likely than the state transferring an officer owing to incompetency.
At the higher levels, bureaucrats are incentivised to retain their positions depending on their loyalty, closeness or sycophancy to political actors.
A major reason bureaucrats receive outsized respect from the larger society despite having a notorious reputation of corruption and inefficiency is the pretence of meritocracy. The UPSC exams may be selective but they do not select “merit” as much as they create elaborate barriers of entry. The exams are essentially a sorting mechanism to exclude as many participants as possible in order to fill up the limited positions. This is done so that the process, at least in the eyes of the public, does not seem entirely arbitrary in theory.
There is no reason why a bureaucrat needs to be generally versed in the Indian arts, for instance, or for that matter, the minutiae of Indian history. These exams do not primarily test the candidate’s ability to conduct basic bureaucratic functions, managerial abilities, awareness of general laws and the limitation of powers or even motivation. They are, instead, a test of the candidate’s knowledge on a whole variety of subjects. In other words, they seek generalists.
As Vikas Divyakirti, head of a coaching institute once pointed out, you do not need to have in-depth knowledge of any subjects to pass these exams. Your awareness should instead be skin deep of the general basics.
The exams are where the quest for “merit” mostly ends. Once an individual gets entry into these jobs, they are promoted not on the basis of performance but seniority. On one hand, there are mechanisms to prevent the bureaucrats from attempting long-term reforms and, on the other, it is supplemented by the powers of the state to disincentivise attempts at honest functioning.
Good performance may or may not reward you, depending on your luck, but becoming a politician’s poodle almost certainly does. This is further complicated by the fact that most candidates do not join the service out of any earnest interest in influencing, drafting or implementing policies but out of a desire to get a secure permanent job, have access to power, opportunities to do corruption and live in subsidised housing at prime locations.
Despite what they might say, very few actually join these services to “help and contribute to society”. Those who really do want to help society and the most vulnerable, like Aruna Roy and Sanjay Hegde, end up leaving the service for either more appropriate jobs or social work.
What is the way out?
These jobs will have to be disincentivised and made less attractive, as is the case in most developed countries, to ensure only those who are really interested join them. Bureaucrats should neither get outsized power nor outsized prestige.
This is not to say there should be no incentive or prestige associated with the job. It is to say that the prestige and incentives associated with the job of a bureaucrat should be similar to those of a doctor, a professor, a software engineer and an architect.
It is only then that our youth will stop wasting their entire productive years in pursuit of a dream that the overwhelming majority of “aspirants” will simply not achieve.
Such pursuits, in fact, detrimentally affect the nation’s growth.