Chanakya's New Manifesto: To Resolve the Crisis Within India by Pavan K. Varma Page B

unstable governments with an eye only on immediate political dividends or survival.
    1.50  The deferment of urgently needed decision making through the mechanism of committees must cease. Governments are entitled to have complex issues properly analyzed. But governance through committees, which seem to have a never-ending term, has become endemic in India. Committees, or such instrumentalities like the EGoMs, must mandatorily make their recommendations within a three-month period.
    1.51  The unproductive ideological ambivalence to economic reform must also end. The two decades after 1991 have shown that there is an undeniable co-relation between economic growth and the liberalization of the economy. The spouting of socialist rhetoric in the name of the poor, often for motivated and shortsighted political reasons, has lost its relevance. The role of the State would, of course, continue to be pivotal, particularly in aligning economic reform to objectives of equity, and in being the prime mover for overall priorities and their effective delivery.
    1.52  New laws to enforce corruption-free governance must be enacted. The bureaucracy and the political leadership must be made accountable for unethical conduct and deterrent punishment meted out expeditiously. This will be dealt with in detail in the subsequent chapter on corruption.
    1.53  A fair process must be set in place to weed out, after twenty years of service, non-performing or under-performing bureaucrats. A period of twenty years is a long enough time to judge the overall performance of an officer, even if he or she has on occasion been the victim of motivated or vindictive assessments. For all central government employees, and officers of the All India Services, the decision to terminate services should be first screened by the Department of Personnel and Training (DOPT) and then sent for endorsement to the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT). State-level employees should be screened by corresponding bodies at the state level. The processing for both categories will need to be mandatorily completed within a year from the date on which the first recommendation was made, and in any case before the officer in question completes twenty-one years of service.
    1.54  Conversely, those bureaucrats who are honest and competent must be protected from the capricious behaviour of their political masters. Central and state administrative tribunals would suo moto monitor all cases where a bureaucrat is deemed to have been transferred before completing his or her normal tenure or punished for apparently motivated reasons, and immediately intervene to restore the status quo. They would be given a maximum period of three months thereafter to examine each case on merit, and if required, restore the status quo ante.
    1.55  In this context, it should be examined whether CAT should be given constitutional status similar to the EC or the proposed GAP.
    1.56  In a parliamentary democracy, the bureaucracy is required to be apolitical. However, this trait has been progressively eroded by the clever stratagem of politicians holding out the carrot of reemployment to retired bureaucrats. Most bureaucrats, if they have been promised a comfortable sinecure after they retire, will toe the line of their political bosses, and even collude with them in wrongdoing. This affects good governance objectives. No bureaucrat should be given an extension in service after retirement, including on contract. He or she will also be ineligible for reemployment or for holding any government office for a compulsory cooling off period of two years. The two-year period will apply also to taking up employment in the corporate sector.
    1.57  Finally, decentralization should become a constant theme in the pursuit of good governance. India is too large and complex a country to have all policies implemented or conceived at the Centre. Mahatma Gandhi was absolutely right when he spoke of the merits of