Book Review: Corruption and Reform in India: Public Services in the Digital Age
| DOI | 10.1177/2321023013509159 |
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
248 Book Reviews
Studies in Indian Politics, 1, 2 (2013): 241–257
The tension between the liberal democratic tenor of the Constitution and the reality of a highly
unequal and hierarchical society is what makes the experience of democracy in India so complex.
Liberal ideas are challenged and are routinely tweaked in response to the groundswell of democratic
aspirations. Instead of hoping to educate citizens to fit into the discourse of liberalism, it is liberalism
and its ideals that are in need of modification so that the experience of democracy comes alive for the
Indian citizen.
Krishna Menon
Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi
E-mail: menonk@hotmail.com
Jennifer Bussell, Corruption and Reform in India: Public Services in the Digital Age. New York: Cambridge
University Press. 2012. 306 pages. ` 895.
DOI: 10.1177/2321023013509159
Walking through the Bangalore Municipal Corporation (Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike)
offices some years ago, I marveled at offices overrun by mountains of files stacked ceiling-high, their
secrets guarded by a sullen bureaucrat, whose cooperation would be needed to unearth anything at
all in that pile. Amidst this erstwhile forest, one might easily conclude that for all the technological
progress India’s private sector made, including many companies located not far from these offices
on M.G. Road, India’s government offices have remained untouched and unimproved by the digital
revolution. But such a reckoning would be wrong, as Jennifer Bussell demonstrates in this impressive
début book. While the Indian administrative state might appear undisturbed, beneath its musty cobwebs,
a stiff breeze, in the form of technology-enabled administrative reform, promises to clear the desks of
bureaucrats nationwide.
The agent of this change is the eGovernment service centre that is mushrooming across India. At
their most expansive, these centres permit one to accomplish some 45 distinct tasks, all of which once
required standing in interminable queues, filling forms in triplicate (one copy of which was destined to
rot in a file cabinet in some nondescript government office), engaging middlemen and, too often, paying
a bribe to grease the path of one’s application for the state’s services. Against this backdrop, it is not
hyperbolic to suggest that the reforms that implemented these technology-enabled service centres are
revolutionizing how Indians deal with their government, though it would be so to suggest the revolution
is near complete.
In fact, as Bussell shows through painstaking original data collection, the extent, design and scope
of such service centres varies significantly across India’s states. While some, like Andhra Pradesh, offer
citizens a wide variety of services that can be accomplished through a service centre, others, like
Uttarakhand, permit but a couple (p. 43). But if such administrative reform is more efficient, and pre-
sumably popular with citizens, why wouldn’t all states utilize them equally? The answer, foreshadowed
by the book’s title, is corruption. Any reform that reduces opportunities to receive bribes in exchange
for providing services threatens politicians’ access to income used to finance re-election campaigns,
and threatens the welfare of bureaucrats whose ability to deliver such rents secures their own livelihood.
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