Indian Governance System

The Indian governance system is a chaotic crazy, oversized and lethargic. The competence level except at the very top is quite pathetic. The accountability is even lower since there is almost zero firing in the sector. Most of the government employees live a sheltered, secure life and a government job in India is as close to heaven that a person can get to on earth. Earlier the government salaries used to be lower than the private ones but now even that disparity has been removed with repeated pay commission hikes, which increase salaries but not the responsibilities and work. It is, therefore, no wonder that hundreds of thousands of people apply to a few hundred government jobs even when the job is that of a security guard or a sweeper. Even PHDs in India want to become a sweeper given the security and life-long comfort of a government job.

The government machinery in India is heavily bloated and slow moving. Most of the government departments and ministries work in glorious isolation with no one having a clue what the other one is going. There is also massive rivalries and antagonism between different departments leading to huge chaos in policy making and implementation.

The recent case of a state-owned company Gujarat Industries Power Company exemplifies this. The central government is trying to promote domestic solar manufacturing in the face of a flood of super cheap dumped Chinese products. However, it has been stifled by WTO to cancel the Domestic Content Requirements (DCR) policy of allowing only Indian made solar panels for a certain percentage of domestic demand. But the government can still go ahead with procurement of domestic panels as per WTO norms.

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But an official in the Gujarat Industries Power Company does not get it. Instead of supporting domestic solar panel guys by only allowing them for his procurement, he has put a strange clause which only “allows Chinese solar panels” to be bought. The company wants 25 years insurance on solar panels which no Indian company can get right now. This means only the Chinese majors can qualify. This shows the massive level of incompetence and stupidity at all levels of our government. While other nations use both explicit and implicit measures to support their home-grown players, our bureaucrats have gone the totally opposite way.