When the British made architectures for governing India a land so vast of incredible variety in ethnicity and languages, the need to create a large and structured bureaucracy was a sine qua non. Our entire social milieu mired in caste was tailor made for this hierarachial rule based system and the much discussed Macaulay’s educational system churned out a steady number of recruits for creating this edifice with the Englishmen at the top. The days of the Raj were simpler, the prime motive was perpetuation of empire and economic benefits to Great Britain. The grand strategic thinking was by the English with the implementation by the natives.
The end of the Raj saw a large number of the native bureaucracy and the military brass getting rapid promotions as the English were eased out, the Indian members of the ICS were continued with after reaffirming their loyalty to the new nation. Saradar Vallabhai Patel the architect of the governing edifice envisaged and created the All India Services, which was famously called the ‘steel frame’ a phrase borrowed from Lloyd George’s speech of 1922 in the British Parliament. The license raj, socialist era PSU’s etc led to a rapid growth in the turf of the bureaucracy. The DNA inherited from the British ensured that control was centralised in all facets of life wherever the bureaucracy
David Wittenberg addressed the semantics of the question regarding the role of bureaucracies this way: “Likening effortful, reflective thinking to bureaucracy misses the mark. Bureaucracies are focused on decision rights, not decision making,” Wittenberg wrote. “They are not created to deliberate or think.”
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