New Delhi: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar Tuesday said a social welfare state is being created in India with a slew of schemes which are changing the socio-economic landscape of the country and asserted that none of that would happen if the bureaucracy was not there to deliver them.
Speaking after launching a book titled ‘Transforming the steel frame – promise and paradox of civil service reform’ edited by former bureaucrat Vinod Rai, Jaishankar said the future of the country is very much dependent on how well the politics and the “steel frame (bureaucracy)” work together.
“We are actually today creating a social welfare state in this country. Nobody has created a social welfare state at $ 2,000 per capita…There are today a range of programmes which are changing the socio-economic landscape of India, but none of that would happen if the bureaucracy was not there to plan it, chart it, deliver it, monitor it and change it,” he said.
The minister said that after 40 years of independence, India realized that its economic model had “run out of steam” and then started the era of reform in the early 1990s.
“But when we conceptualized reforms we largely saw reform in a very limited economic way. It had other political consequences and foreign policy consequences. If I were to compare India’s 1990s with Japan’s 1860s or China’s 1970s and 80s, I think a very big difference is that the kind of deep and broad reforms which were done, especially in the bureaucracy in their respective steel frames, was something that did not happen in India,” Jaishankar said.
“It is very consequential because today the compulsion on a democracy to deliver is so deep that by simply posting high growth rates that we did for many years after the 1990s, we did not necessarily have the impact on the ground that we should have…There were also a lot of national security consequences,” he said citing the example of the neglect of the border infrastructure in earlier times, which he added was “costing us very heavily” today.
Hailing the current lot of bureaucracy coming in, Jaishankar said he finds that the people making it were far more independent, experienced and there was a much broader spread.
“When we get into these ‘does democracy work in India’ debates, the three examples I cite of how well the democracy works in India are – the composition of Parliament, composition of the cricket team and the composition of the bureaucracy – look at how much more diverse all of them have become,” Jaishankar said.
The book launch was also addressed by India’s G20 Sherpa Amitabh Kant and Rai, the former Comptroller and Auditor General of India.
PTI
