Prologue : India has been a unique civilization whereby the balance of power between the variegated set of institutions has had been evenly distributed. All this emanated not out of the modern motif of law, which needs elaborate intellectual skullduggery calling for never ending debates and incessant trail of admissible evidences; but simply out of the deeper precincts of inner conscience and societal observations which used to be subtle but substantial when it came to compliance. This did create ample avenues for creation and human elevation beyond the routine rhetoric for basics. 

The entrepreneurs were regulated by the rulers who were in turn controlled by the spiritualists - the conscience keepers of various hues. The spiritualists in turn had their own self-regulating mechanisms to keep the nobility and integrity intact. Social ostracism used to be the most effective defense against fissiparous iconoclasm, though debates and deliberations on fresh ideas was always welcome and given space to.  

This still remains the very way of living of the majority of the Indian people spread over 6,00,000 hamlets though the advent of modernity is trying hard to rupture the tranquil & order for vested reasons. The innate sense of dharma and self-regulation is so profound even after the millennium long upheavals that the neo-imperialist forces find it rather tough to abrogate this civilizational sanctity.

Innumerable ploys have been conceived, crafted and championed in the name of ennobling missions ranging from the likes of "White men's burden to civilize India" to that of "securing global peace" to "human development" to "democratic empowerment" to "free market globalized trade" to “big ticket financial reforms". The list goes on and on but the innate imperialistic objectives do sustain in all designs ever since the Charter of December 31st, 1600 CE. Ample empirical research and analysis is available on these strands for substantiation.

The New Global Order which intends to rule over the minds creating a monolith of material choices is hurting the humanity like never before. The attempt to cast the 7 billion odd populace in a single mould would go as one the most disastrous of experiments in the annals of history. Over Centralization of the power to control the means of production and distribution have had been disastrous. Be it the regimes emanating out of the philological prescriptions of Das Kapital or be it the ardent followers of Adam Smith, the outcomes have not been conducive to human society at large. Stooped in deep materialism of "God created man in His own image to exercise dominion" as well as "dialectical materialism", the Christian civilization is on the verge of giving up in championing a resolution for human vagaries. The Islamic Civilization is far off from this narrative altogether as it is busy and hell bound on a self-destructive spree altogether. 

The advent of a nationalist disposition in India led by a devout Hindu, had attracted the global attention all of a sudden, especially the non-Christian and non-Islamic leaders from across the globe who accepted him at once their natural leader. For ages much before the advent of these proselytizing faiths, India has been their predominant source of inspiration, living upto their civilizational convictions.

Nonetheless, the leader has somehow been cowed down by the glitz of materialism. He has been amply entangled by the angst of the fissiparous brigade whose admission & acceptance has somewhere become a dominant goal. The personal aspiration to repeat the hat-trick of wielding to power somewhere restrains the sincere consideration of meaningful voices even.

Armed with its spiritual moorings of minimalism & austerity, India remains the only civilizational power which can defeat the advance of crass materialism manifesting into consumerist charlatan ship.

Nevertheless, the tryst with 2 years of Modi era has little to elate the die-hard nationalists who have their own criticism of the existing directionality. Their expectations from the nationalist disposition can be comprehended from both a negative commentary and positive prescriptions.

Operational Efficiency Driven Governance
A mere amplification of the operational efficiency of the government of the day somehow can't do away with the need and relevance of a differentiated policy regime deeply coupled with the indigenous traditions & aspirations. The Ministries/Departments which are performing the best and releasing their daily scoreboards are ironically the ones which were established by the Imperial rulers with great fanfare and effort. This is probably the only domain which is getting the requisite emphasis and attracting due delivery. However, the fruits of the same would need a supporting ecosystem buildup around.

Preparing Ground for Global Finance
The deep integration of the Indian economy with the shackles of Global Finance send shivers down the spine as this shall transform India into a mammoth market with the power of seamless extraction. Jandhan has shown the Indian potential. The India Post Payment Banks is watering the mouth of the Global Financial Cartel which is gung-ho about taking control of the same. The recently announced Rail Insurance at Re 1 per ticket is an added revenue stream for the insurance world. None of those jazzy infographics showed the relevance and need of such an insurance. How many accidents or mishaps happen on a regular basis? Why aren't the Railway Funds not sufficient for such an ex-grata relief to the victims? In the blind rhetoric for #acchedin, everything and anything is being made to accept. Today it's Re 1, tomorrow it can be extended far and wide. In a financial ecosystem whereby Life Insurance is distinct from Health Insurance with the increasing market place of Term Insurance commoditising human lives, this is nothing but a firm subservience to the elation of Global Financial Order.

Spinning the Black Money Narrative
The entire narrative around corruption generated black money has been spin doctored to tax evaded black money. A time bomb has been affixed at every nook and cranny of the country creating an unprecedented terror of the state on small time tax evaders who in their own little judgment felt it worthwhile to have more cash at their disposal to support societal institutions rather than the ever expanding Sursa of Government establishment.

Minimum Government and Maximum Governance
A whopping 2 lakh new Government of India employees are being inducted out of which 70,000 odd sleuths would be flexing their muscles on the citizens to cough more taxes. The electoral call of Minimum Government and Maximum Governance is being flouted beyond imagination and that too under the ambit of whopping investments on Digital Governance.

Niradhar Aadhar
Aadhar linked Jandhan Accounts has been made a reality before Aadhar linked Passports, PAN Cards, Driving Licenses which could have tracked the movement of money bogeys, big time swindlers and conduits & brokers of power. The reverse ratification of the biometrics has still not been established in the public domain, meaning thereby that using my IRIS and fingerprints alone my Aadhar just can't be retrieved.

Departure from RTI & RFD
The annals of Right to Information have been smartly constricted and shut down. The Results Framework Document which could have empirically mapped the performance of various departments and agencies has been done away with.

Telecom & Aviation Cartels
The Government has failed to reign-in the Telecom and Aviation Cartels which are running their writ over and above the warnings of the regulators and pleas of the ministers. The Prime Ministerial dictum of #GiveItUp by all those who are capable, has been taken literally across fleecing zones. Airport Parkings are n times costlier than the Metro ones. The Airport Managements are allowed to create a wild-goose chase for discounted parking beyond 24 hours. Why on earth, I should produce the Registration Certificate of my car which is parked in a fully automated parking lot? The Cab cartels are allowed to occupy the frontal most lane at dropping and picking up points leaving aside the tax paying citizens at peril all over again with private guards taking control of these privatized spaces. Even normal packaged food products are made at least 4 times costly in the airport zones making it an additional ticket cost for a middle class family which wants to straddle this vast landmass on air. The Airport Metro transit connection is again broken down by a slew of discouraging tactics, hard to catch upfront. 

Unimaginative Bureaucratic Order
Making a PR driven communications blitzkrieg doesn't galvanize a self-serving and unimaginable bureaucracy which is adept in saying Yes Boss with knuckles erect. Filling the old wine from their old closets into a new bottle having a different brand/design is the easiest job role for them. They thereby chastise the very mention of an older scheme and its accomplished impact while crafting a new one. It simply remains the prerogative of the CAG mortuary which might pick up an audit para or two, which won't eat away the career prospect of any of the high ranking bureaucrat. Their public consultations are an eye wash at best and none of the suggestions are data coded into a system which can be pulled back for scrutiny. The ER sheets simply mention of the postings and the departments and never of the schemes/projects handled, leaving aside the level of performance and impact ascertained.

Tom-Tomming Aspirations with Torn Apart Implementations
The Smart City narrative is not much different from the fabled JNNURM except for the fact that the local Municipal Bodies have been given the mandate of granting long term concession agreements to big-shot organizations for decades at once. The 26 odd technological interventions under the Smart City Narrative have not been elaborated at length anywhere leaving aside ample interpretation for the preparation of RFQs et al. No technology evaluation or compliance apex body has been envisaged to look into the appropriateness of the same. If the reality of the Smart City Challenge is to be dissected, merely look at the number of followers of the individual twitter handles of the projected Smart Cities. They just don't add-up anywhere considering the aplomb. The official website of Smart Cities which is considered to be one of the most cherished projects of independent India is unimpressive to the core. More so it carries PDF documents which can't be copied for analysis at once. Whether the information asymmetry is organic to the governmental system or has been deliberately induced, remains the talking point of the town.

Real Estate shall alone drive Innovations
The Atal Innovation Mission's Incubator scheme document has nothing which makes it differentiated either in vision or operation what India's 291 existing incubators are not doing. It's dominant emphasis on the real estate of 10K square feet defies all high-handed talks and seminars under the aegis of this grand institution which somehow couldn't change its character with its name change. The bureaucratic order of passing the buck of tough choices to the citizenry is quite emphatic whereby no imagination has been put to place about the convergence of information pertaining to the direction of innovation drawing inputs from the R&D majors, end user organizations and the like. Why can't a national database of innovation comprising of in-depth problem statements across national endeavors be curated under the aegis of NITI Aayog for driving the definitive direction of innovation in the country? Why hasn't the existing incubator base be upended to cater to the national narrative? Isn't their learning experience not relevant? How shall a newer implementation regime under the aegis of NITI Aayog, leaving aside the inter-ministerial bodies like NSTEDB. The 25 odd sectors identified under Make in India have no correspondence to this boisterous schema, as if both shall work in stark oblivion.

Mudra is only in Disbursement
The 1.8 lakh crore disbursement of loans under Mudra seem to have no co-relation with the underlying impact on microprises. The back-end design and front-end marketing support to the microprises is nowhere visible. The political rhetoric is around the conventional talking tale of amount of disbursements. Well the earlier regimes too had disbursed whopping amounts leading to the rupture of Indian's banking system at once.

The flipkarts of the world had promised to augment the Benarasi Sarees soon after the parliamentarian of the town became Indian Premiere. No action has been seen on that forefront so far. Khadi was championed in addresses, but no brand store of the fabled khadi products has ever come to the fore. The 7 odd GI registry products of Eastern Uttar Pradesh do have the potential to become Unicorn enterprises. Their organization might be under the ambit of a cooperative. But it somehow seems that the 73 odd parliamentarians from the state have not been able to smell the economic opportunity associated.

If the organized efforts of the government have not born fruit, what to talk of the ailing and struggling microprises which do fuel Indian economy after agriculture. A cluster based approach and value chain of the entire spectrum of microprises still allude the mandarins at MSME who sometime see it as a punishment posting rather than weaving the dreams of interspersing the 300 odd industrial clusters of the country nurturing microprises with the vast and elaborate techno-managerial educational establishment of the country aided and abetted by the elaborate MSME Tool Rooms, Industry Commissioners, DICs and the like.

Broken Policy Perspectives
Go through any of the newly released policy document and the intellectual rupture would be quite pronounced. India's National Forest Policy needs the financial support of UNDP as if the budgetary allocation is not upto the mark or the grand national institutions surviving on public money have not been able to groom the requisite indigenous talent. Policy prescription of a multilateral agency have been simply incorporated at once without any contextualization.

The much hyped New Education Policy is again a linear product of bureaucratic imagination rather than a path breaking outcome oriented anthology of inspirational action directives. A one size fit all Delhi centric approach fails to cluster the various educational strata separately and deal them specifically and in-depth. A policy which was claimed to be crafted bottoms up as if a referendum was in the making, has not been able to capture the imagination of any serious thinker and advocate of education. 

Noise, Numbers and Numb Narratives
Instead of adding to the existing base of institutions, diagnosing their operational problems, investigating their genesis and suggesting remedial medicines, the national transformers are tending to adopt an interesting policy mix.

Simply by naming a new set of institutions as World Class, won't make them so overnight, whatsoever be the legal structure & out of the world monetary support granted. Are these simply the outcome of a personal aspiration to create another legacy or a suggestion of some to ensure some post-retirement fiefdoms? The nation saw the much avowed talks about new-age Nalanda, which is still a project in waiting after hundreds of crore of budgetary allocations. The one in the ruins is captivating and inspiring enough. The Real Estate Centric view of the World Class Institutions can only be of a careerist bureaucracy which is at ease with rotating papers pertaining to allocation of land, selection of consultants and eventually the contractors to create monuments and filing the utilization certificate in the budgetary documents. Couldn't the entire network of IITs, NITs, IIITs, STUs in a particular state be given the challenge of becoming world class? What does World Class actually mean? Have our policy mandarins tried to have a single symposium to define such basic abstraction in the context of our country?

The rapid expansion of the IIT system has eaten away its meritocracy, whose harvest was visible across the global bonhomie of PIOs. Like a Railway Station or a Airport Strip, every state should have an IIT despite the fact that this IIT has nothing to do with the regional issues or challenges. They do remain islands in oblivion creating a professional workforce ever ready to cross the shores and empower alien economies, which keep ours at bay through currency conversions. In order to mitigate the budgetary burden over and above the massive 4000 crore and the concerned criticism thereof, simply double up the fee at once with another noise of #giveitup. All bureaucratic innovations to weed away the coaching institutions by altering the IIT-JEE examination pattern every now and then has not born any fruit as well. This is despite the fact that the majority members of the bureaucracy would have availed their 4+ attempts in the UPSC examination and would have undergone the iterative rounds of all coaching classes. A senior bureaucrat of the rank of Principal Secretary to Government of Uttar Pradesh, while visiting a secluded outhouse of a field project at once remarked that it's an ideal place for 'mugging' for the IAS. Such was his allegiance to that one examination which gave him the lifelong right to govern the country, good or bad. Was the well settled practice of having a handful of nationally acclaimed institutions run by dogged professors training a set of superb minds selected through a rigorous entrance process hurting the bureaucratic ego?

Epilogue
The aforesaid commentary can go on and on. It's somewhat discomforting the nationalists of the dharmic order that a once in a lifetime opportunity is somewhat being lost by adhering to the motifs and meanings of the New Global Order which intends to leverage the trinity of Finance, Regulation and Technology to spread its tentacles thwarting the advent of a dharmic democracy of individualized citizenry.

Any nation has risen to glory through an iconoclastic thought process which is intellectually driven, politically championed and bureaucratically executed. While the political cadres of the day are championing what is mandated to them, the all-knowing and ever powerful bureaucrats have supplanted the intellectuals who have been cast aside. Those who have been co-opted into the system have an uncanny awe and reverence to the upholders of the three lettered permanent entitlement of position.

The political propaganda machinery has somehow mandated the intellectuals to fall in line without daring to criticize even the most inconsistent of the policy decks as if the entire bureaucratic machinery has been genetically transformed into an unprecedented workforce having only the national interest in mind and an original vision of the nation in mind.

Creating a halo of authority certainly needs an unprecedented subservience of the instruments of the state. It's only through discipline that a mammoth undertaking can be accomplished. However, if this is expected out of a nation's intellectuals as well, who have to sing the peans day in and day out, in order to prove their nationalism and dharmic way of life, it's the fastest way to become an autocratic state.

The need of the hour is to invoke a mid-term course correction where some big ticket reform in the Indian context are heralded leveraging the full political force of the dharmic order. The domains of Governance, Economy, Environment & Education have to be revisited in the context of the vast pool of Indian thought and tradition. There are giants in these fields with life long authority and futuristic vision coupled with the daring to take on the global designs in the most practical manner. The over dependence of the bureaucratic order along with their vast segments of professional consultants in policy making and creating programme guidelines need to be normalized. The indigenous academic institutions having homegrown talent has enough cerebrum and executing capabilities to rise up to the occasions creating some of the finest experiments in public policy which delivers.

A suggestive list of interventions have been mentioned below just to catalyze an out of the box thinking process leaving aside the bureaucratic routine of governance which is in shambles at the moment. 

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Why can't the various Expense Heads of the Government have mapped to its Income Sources? The Social Welfare Schemes to that of Direct Taxes and the Basic Establishment Ones to the all-pervading Indirect Taxes. In times of additional requirement, the citizens would be more than keen to contribute by way of additional cess and surcharges on products & services.

Why can't the Direct Tax Payers be given preferential treatment of Government Services with their due recognition of their contribution to the creation of an egalitarian state? Why shouldn't tax be positioned more as a contribution than a thankless obligation inviting penal provisions?

Why can't a deadline for a Cashless Economy be set out when we have Aadhar as the game changer and the overdrive for Jandhan Accounts already in place? This shall obliterate the need of an additional work force of 70K odd tax sleuths in one go. These educated chaps can be motivated to taken on micropreneurship in their local areas.

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Why can't the goal of limiting the size of the government leveraging all-pervading technology be put in place as the self-serving system innovates its parasitic existence in one way or the other?

Why shouldn't a Empowered Committees of Citizens be made for every Ministry/Department drawn from various walks of life? They can aide the Minister-in-Charge to take deeper well meaning decisions devoid of bureaucratic and expert shenanigans and can help in drawing out innumerable perspectives and use-cases. 

Accentuating a welfare state has somewhere got reduced to the welfare of the employees of the state and not the people at large. This can be obliterated by decentralizing the mandate of welfare governance at the local level. Small is beautiful goes the management mantra across organizational theories. 

Why not the due empowerment of non-political social institutions at the grass root level be accentuated in the right earnest to take charge of sensible social concerns with immense local deviations? 

Why can't the institutions of the 31 odd District Departmental Officers be elevated at par with that of District Magistrates in the changed mandate of national discourse?

Why can't Social Audit be made an integral part of all Governmental Schemes? How can it remain fair that the one writing the exams is evaluating the same as well? 

***

Why shouldn't the predominant goal of Higher Techno-Managerial Education be linked with the local, regional and national developmental discourse? 

Why shouldn't the entire spectrum of Higher Educational Institutions be integrated into a grid with well defined end-goals in terms of local level planning and appropriate skill generation? 

Why shouldn't Research & Development be integrated to the Premiere Academia and the End Users by the creation of seamless R&D Databases across Fund Granting Ministries? 

Why can't these institutions of higher standing be transformed into local resource centers replete with vivid & elaborate documentation and executables onto which the administrative authorities as well as corporate contractors can rely upon?

Why can't the onus of Primary Education be given to the third tier of governance at once with due empowerment of local resource mobilization? Can't the 672 odd district level leadership take on this challenge?

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Why can't the entire natural resource base of the 32 lakh square km be documented, mapped and put into an executable system by our premiere agencies at once leaving little scope for information asymmetry? 

Why can't long term tactical perspective plans based on this data deck be created for the usage of national mineral wealth and the corresponding industrial exploitation alongside?

Why can't the Ministries of Agriculture, PDS and Food Processing be converged to create local loops of production, processing and distribution? 

Why can't a Food Processing Revolution be taken up by institutions like NIFTEM which have secured their space as yet another institution with big ticket government grant with its mission enunciated only in its name creating employees for global behemoths?

***

The list can go on and on. The platforms are there, the mechanisms are well in place, Just that a paradigm shift in thinking has to be made. 

The balance of power in the Indian tradition has always been profuse and profound never unnerved by any authority whatsoever. Iconoclasm has been in the Indian genes since inception. 

Parting Anecdote
The all mighty emperor was all feared. His streak of dharma made him respectable of the respectables. His dogged work schedules and commitment to his work made him infallible not amongst the humans but even Gods. None dared to question him, for one reason or the other. But there was an innocuous kid, bereft of fear or favoritism. He encountered the Emperor once, accidentally in a public procession. He at once shouted at the top of his voice "The Emperor is Naked" and went all across sharing this finding of his, which had had been overlooked by one and all.