REFORGING THE RUSTED STEEL FRAME: CIVIL SERVICES NEED REFORMS FROM WOMB TO TOMB

India’s dream of Atmanirbhar Bharat will remain incomplete unless its rusted steel frame — the civil services — is reforged.

- K. MAHESH

Despite the extraordinary constitutional protection granted to them under Article 311, the Indian bureaucracy continues to be plagued by inefficiency, corruption, and a worrying lack of empathy for the people it serves.

India is among only a dozen federal democracies in the world that extend such constitutional protection to its civil servants. Yet, even after 75 years of Independence and more than 600 state and union committees and commissions recommending reforms from the Gorwala Report (1951) and Appleby Report (1953) to the Administrative Reforms Commissions of 1966 and 2005 — the system remains largely unchanged.

While much public debate revolves around electoral and judicial reforms, civil services reform arguably deserves higher priority. The bureaucracy's inefficiency is not merely a governance issue; it lies at the heart of the country's judicial backlog, time of Parliament getting utilised to discuss local governance issues then discussing and debating national issues, and erosion of public trust.

India’s courts are burdened by over five crore pending cases — 4.6 crore in lower courts, 63 lakh in High Courts, and nearly 87,000 in the Supreme Court (as per the National Judicial Data Grid, 2025). More than half involve the government as a litigant. This is when a large number of Indians are not leading a Constitutional way of life due to illiteracy and poverty

This “docket explosion” is not an accident. It reflects the absence of administrative and judicial imagination among civil servants.

Poorly drafted orders, lack of due diligence, and weak understanding of legal provisions force citizens into litigation. Most officers receive little or no serious grounding in administrative law, constitutional interpretation, or landmark judicial pronouncements.