Download or read book Red Tape written by Akhil Gupta and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-17 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yet India's poor are not disenfranchised; they actively participate in the democratic project.
Download or read book Paper Tiger written by Nayanika Mathur and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paper Tiger shifts the debate on state failure and opens up new understanding of the workings of the contemporary Indian state.
Download or read book Indian Bureaucracy written by Har Swarup Singh and published by . This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India's governance structure a throwback to the Raj days has to meet the challenges of lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and empowering them' as citizens of a democratic polity. The development and welfare orientation at the normative level in India does not get translated too well in positive terms into actual results of a progressive and just society. More and better plans are constantly drawn up but the bureaucracy's capacity to deliver never worth bragging about so far as development is concerned has noticeably declined over the years. Political masters and the civil service elite often resort to collusion and connivance to use public office for private gain thwarting all good intentions. Corruption and inefficiency combined with callousness in dealing with the public certainly are very serious problems. However we really ought to be looking more closely at fundamental systemic problems in administration. Our basic civil service structure at the all-India level the focus of this book suffers from several maladies including: Lack of specialization and discrimination against specialists; insularity; lack of accountability; unsuitable recruitment and testing procedures; and faulty personnel management. That the country persists in having such administrative setup in this day and age is nothing short of tragic. The situation is so bad that tinkering with the administrative structure even overhauling it will not do much good. The need clearly is to reform the system drastically to re-engineer it so as to have competency technical and otherwise and professionalism accountability and transparency and responsiveness and civility; let us make our civil servants civil and servants of the people. After all aren't these the imperatives of democratic governance within the overall goal of achieving rapid economic and social progress?
Download or read book Unwritten Flaws of Indian Bureaucracy written by Barun Kumar Sahu and published by Pustak Mahal. This book was released on 2004 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Lines of the Nation written by Laura Bear and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lines of the Nation radically recasts the history of the Indian railways, which have long been regarded as vectors of modernity and economic prosperity. From the design of carriages to the architecture of stations, employment hierarchies, and the construction of employee housing, Laura Bear explores the new public spaces and social relationships created by the railway bureaucracy. She then traces their influence on the formation of contemporary Indian nationalism, personal sentiments, and popular memory. Her probing study challenges entrenched beliefs concerning the institutions of modernity and capitalism by showing that these rework older idioms of social distinction and are legitimized by forms of intimate, affective politics. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research in the company town at Kharagpur and at the Eastern Railway headquarters in Kolkata (Calcutta), Bear focuses on how political and domestic practices among workers became entangled with the moralities and archival technologies of the railway bureaucracy and illuminates the impact of this history today. The bureaucracy has played a pivotal role in the creation of idioms of family history, kinship, and ethics, and its special categorization of Anglo-Indian workers still resonates. Anglo-Indians were formed as a separate railway caste by Raj-era racial employment and housing policies, and other railway workers continue to see them as remnants of the colonial past and as a polluting influence. The experiences of Anglo-Indians, who are at the core of the ethnography, reveal the consequences of attempts to make political communities legitimate in family lines and sentiments. Their situation also compels us to rethink the importance of documentary practices and nationalism to all family histories and senses of relatedness. This interdisciplinary anthropological history throws new light not only on the imperial and national past of South Asia but also on the moral life of present technologies and economic institutions.
Download or read book Sexual Harassment in the Indian Bureaucracy written by Arundhati Bhattacharyya and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-06 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Indian bureaucracy provides the framework that ensures the successful running of a democratic country, continuing the heritage of the Indian Civil Service during British colonial rule. However, patriarchy has continued to serve as the norm in these institutions, with the sexual harassment of bureaucrats representing a particular challenge. Sexual harassment in the workplace is a hard reality, but systematic studies of this phenomenon are few and far between. In this regard, bureaucracy is an area which needs particular academic analysis. This book addresses this research gap and studies the relevance of socio-economic factors leading to sexual harassment in the Indian bureaucracy in Kolkata, Delhi and Bengaluru. It also explores the levels and forms of this harassment, the gender and position of the harasser, and the level of filing complaints by the victims. Moreover, the reasons behind the silence of the victims regarding filing complaints are also analysed. As such, it is a revealing and illuminating analysis of the hitherto unexplored area of the dynamics of one facet of gender relationships in the Indian bureaucracy. The book will be useful to scholars in the fields of anthropology, law, sociology, economics, social work, political science, gender studies, and development studies, as well as other social sciences.
Download or read book Bureaucratic Archaeology written by Ashish Avikunthak and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bureaucratic Archaeology is a multi-faceted ethnography of quotidian practices of archaeology, bureaucracy and science in postcolonial India, concentrating on the workings of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). This book uncovers an endemic link between micro-practice of archaeology in the trenches of the ASI to the manufacture of archaeological knowledge, wielded in the making of political and religious identity and summoned as indelible evidence in the juridical adjudication in the highest courts of India. This book is a rare ethnography of the daily practice of a postcolonial bureaucracy from within rather than from the outside. It meticulously uncovers the social, cultural, political and epistemological ecology of ASI archaeologists to show how postcolonial state assembles and produces knowledge. This is the first book length monograph on the workings of archaeology in a non-western world, which meticulously shows how theory of archaeological practice deviates, transforms and generates knowledge outside the Euro-American epistemological tradition.
Download or read book Colonial Terror written by Deana Heath and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of colonial rule and some of the ways in which extraordinary violence was embedded in the ordinary operation of colonial states. Although enacted largely by Indians on Indian bodies, particularly by subaltern members of the police, the book argues that torture was facilitated, systematized, and ultimately sanctioned by first the East India Company and then the Raj because it benefitted the colonial regime, since rendering the police a source of terror played a key role in the construction and maitenance of state sovereignty. Drawing upon the work of both Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, Colonial Terror contends, furthermore, that it is only possible to understand the terrorizing nature of the colonial police in India by viewing colonial India as a 'regime of exception' in which two different forms of exceptionality were in operation - one wrought through the exclusion of particular groups or segments of the Indian population from the law and the other by petty sovereigns in their enactment of illegal violence in the operation of the law. It was in such fertile ground, in which colonial subjects were both included within the domain of colonial law while also being abandoned by it, that torture was able to flourish.
Download or read book Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Bureaucracy But Were Afraid to Ask written by T. R. Raghunandan and published by Penguin Enterprise. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whatever its faults, the Indian bureaucracy cannot be accused of bias when it comes to confounding those who have to deal with it. Veteran insiders who return to it with their petitions after retirement are as clueless about how it functions as freshly minted supplicants. Outsiders in any case have little knowledge of who is responsible for what and why or how to navigate that critical proposal through the treacherous shoals of the secretariat. At the top of the heap is the fast-tracked elite civil servant, who belongs to a group of generalist and specialized services selected through a competitive examination. The aura of the Indian Administrative Service has remained intact over the years. Lack of awe, bordering on civilized disrespect, is a most effective learning tool. In this humorous, practical book, T.R. Raghunandan aims to deconstruct the structure of the bureaucracy and how it functions, for the understanding of the common person and replaces the anxiety that people feel when they step into a government office with a healthy dollop of irreverence.
Download or read book Empires and Bureaucracy in World History written by Peter Crooks and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-03 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did empires rule different peoples across vast expanses of space and time? And how did small numbers of imperial bureaucrats govern large numbers of subordinated peoples? Empires and Bureaucracy in World History seeks answers to these fundamental problems in imperial studies by exploring the power and limits of bureaucracy. The book is pioneering in bringing together historians of antiquity and the Middle Ages with scholars of post-medieval European empires, while a genuinely world-historical perspective is provided by chapters on China, the Incas and the Ottomans. The editors identify a paradox in how bureaucracy operated on the scale of empires and so help explain why some empires endured for centuries while, in the contemporary world, empires fail almost before they begin. By adopting a cross-chronological and world-historical approach, the book challenges the abiding association of bureaucratic rationality with 'modernity' and the so-called 'Rise of the West'.
Download or read book Policymaker s Journal written by Kaushik Basu and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book charts the course of Kaushik Basu’s career over seven years, as he moved out of the cloisters of academe to the frenetic world of policymaking, first in India as Chief Economic Adviser to the Indian Government and after that as Chief Economist at the World Bank in Washington. The Indian years were a period of high inflation, growth challenges (as the global financial crisis arrived in India), and also a remarkable growth recovery story, with India moving past China’s GDP growth rate. There were corruption scandals breaking, causing widespread street protests, a lot of late-night decision-making, which one knew would rock the stock market the next day, and getting to know politicians who were outstanding as statesmen in the midst of all this, and also many who were not. The World Bank years weren’t that close to actual policymaking, but nevertheless breath-taking in their scope. They ranged from interacting with policymakers in tiny remote countries like Samoa to gigantic nations with comparable heft, such as China. It entailed sitting down with leading researchers to compute and announce global numbers on extreme poverty and rankings on how easy it is to do business in different countries (fully aware that there would be calls from irate finance ministers as soon as these were published). And there was the handling of politics within the World Bank, which could actually be as enjoyable as any global economic problem! This book is a revised version of the diary that Kaushik Basu kept for seven years. Revised because he often wrote the diary in a hurry at the day’s or even week’s end. He has now inserted some reflections in retrospect, without altering any descriptions of what actually happened.
Download or read book Bureaucracy Belonging and the City in North India written by MICHAEL S. DODSON and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-08-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a re-evaluation of modern urbanism and architecture and a history of urbanism, architecture, and local identity in colonial north India at the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on Banaras and Jaunpur, two of northern India's most traditional cities, the book examines the workings of colonial bureaucracy in the cities and argues that interactions with the colonial state were an integral aspect of the ways that Indians created a sense of their own personal investment in the city in which they lived. The book explores the every-day and the mundane to better understand the limits of British colonial power, and the role of Indians themselves, in the making of the modern city. Based on highly localized archival source material, the author analyses two key aspects of city-making in this era: the building of new infrastructure, such as water supply and sewerage, and new policies governing historical architectural conservation. The book also incorporates an ethnography of contemporary urban space in these cities to advocate for a more nuanced and responsible approach to writing the history of such cities and to address the myriad problems of present-day north Indian urbanism. Containing examples of bureaucratic procedure and its contradictions and enlivened by a set of personal reflections and narratives of the author's own experiences, this book is a valuable addition to the field of South Asian Studies, Asian History and Asian Culture and Society, Colonial History and Urban History.
Download or read book The Absent Dialogue written by Anit Mukherjee and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Absent Dialogue, Anit Mukherjee examines the relations between politicians, bureaucrats, and the military in India and argues that the pattern of civil-military relations in India hampers the effectiveness of the Indian military. Informed by more than a hundred and fifty interviews with high ranking officials, as well as archival material, this book sheds new light on both India's political and military history, as well as democratic civilian control and military effectiveness more generally.
Download or read book Government of Paper written by Matthew S. Hull and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Drawing inspiration from actor-network theory, science studies, and semiotics, this brilliant book makes us completely rethink the workings of bureaucracy as analyzed by Max Weber and James Scott. Matthew Hull demonstrates convincingly how the materiality of signs truly matters for understanding the projects of ‘the state.’” - Katherine Verdery, author of What was Socialism, and What Comes Next? “We are used to studies of roads and rails as central material infrastructure for the making of modern states. But what of records, the reams and reams of paper that inscribe the state-in-making? This brilliant book inquires into the materiality of information in colonial and postcolonial Pakistan. This is a work of signal importance for our understanding of the everyday graphic artifacts of authority.” - Bill Maurer, author of Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason "This is an excellent and truly exceptional ethnography. Hull presents a theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich reading that will be an invaluable resource to scholars in the field of Anthropology and South Asian studies. The author’s focus on bureaucracy, “corruption," writing systems and urban studies (Islamabad) in a post-colonial context makes for a unique ethnographic engagement with contemporary Pakistan. In addition, Hull’s study is a refreshing voice that breaks the mold of current representation of Pakistan through the security studies paradigm." - Kamran Asdar Ali, Director, South Asia Institute, University of Texas
Download or read book Bureaucratic Culture in Early Colonial India written by James Lees and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2019-07-01 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at how the fledgling British East India Company state of the 1760s developed into the mature Anglo-Indian empire of the 19th century. It investigates the bureaucratic culture of early Company administrators, primarily at the district level, and the influence of that culture on the nature and scope of colonial government in India. Drawing on a host of archival material and secondary sources, James Lees details the power relationship between local officials and their superiors at Fort William in Calcutta, and examines the wider implications of that relationship for Indian society. The book brings to the fore the manner in which the Company’s roots in India were established despite its limited military resources and lack of governmental experience. It underlines how the early colonial polity was shaped by European administrators’ attitudes towards personal and corporate reputation, financial gain, and military governance. A thoughtful intervention in understanding the impact of the Company’s government on Indian society, this volume will be of interest to researchers working within South Asian studies, British studies, administrative history, military history, and the history of colonialism.
Download or read book The India Way written by S. Jaishankar and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2020-09-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The decade from the 2008 global financial crisis to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic has seen a real transformation of the world order. The very nature of international relations and its rules are changing before our eyes. For India, this means optimal relationships with all the major powers to best advance its goals. It also requires a bolder and non-reciprocal approach to its neighbourhood. A global footprint is now in the making that leverages India's greater capability and relevance, as well as its unique diaspora. This era of global upheaval entails greater expectations from India, putting it on the path to becoming a leading power. In The India Way, S. Jaishankar, India's Minister of External Affairs, analyses these challenges and spells out possible policy responses. He places this thinking in the context of history and tradition, appropriate for a civilizational power that seeks to reclaim its place on the world stage.
Download or read book Bureaucrats and Politicians in Western Democracies written by Joel D. ABERBACH and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In uneasy partnership at the helm of the modern state stand elected party politicians and professional bureaucrats. This book is the first comprehensive comparison of these two powerful elites. In seven countries--the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, and the Netherlands--researchers questioned 700 bureaucrats and 6OO politicians in an effort to understand how their aims, attitudes, and ambitions differ within cultural settings. One of the authors' most significant findings is that the worlds of these two elites overlap much more in the United States than in Europe. But throughout the West bureaucrats and politicians each wear special blinders and each have special virtues. In a well-ordered polity, the authors conclude, politicians articulate society's dreams and bureaucrats bring them gingerly to earth.
