Independent Regulatory Authorities in India: A Comparative Perspective

DOI10.1177/0019556118793474
Date01 September 2018
Published date01 September 2018
AuthorMahendra Prasad Singh
Subject MatterEditorial
Editorial
Independent Regulatory
Authorities in India:
A Comparative Perspective
Independent regularity authorities (IRAs) are agencies of modern democratic
governments, parts of the executive wing with a certain degree of statutory or
constitutional autonomy, reporting directly to the legislature. Like the general
executive, they are accountable to the legislature and subject to judicial review.
Initially, both the executive and the legislature in presidential as well as parlia-
mentary systems in the classical democratic constitutions and political systems of
the modern West resisted IRAs motivated by considerations of unitarian executive
government or unitary parliamentary sovereignty. However, with the increasing
expansion of the scope and activities of governmental operations, IRAs came to
be accepted as a needed instrumentality in the context of structural differentiation
and functional specialisation.
The US Constitution and the political system is the locus classicus of
IRAs. There was in this first written and first presidential-federal constitution an
evident intent and purpose of the Constituent Group or makers to liberalise, consti-
tutionalise and federalise the system of majoritarian parliamentary democracy
in the trail of the imperial Great Britain from whose colonial yoke they had
liberated themselves from in the first modern radical political revolution called the
American War of Independence in the last quarter of the 18th century. They first
briefly experimented with a confederal union under the Articles of Confederation
drafted by the Continental Congress and then, frustrated by its failings emanating
from an extremely weak general government, made another attempt at constitu-
tion making and drafted and adopted a federal constitution for the United States of
America at the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. The basic theory of this constitu-
tional venture was classically explicated in The Federalist (1987[1787]) authored
by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, among the leading makers
of the American Constitution. The Constitution itself did not create an IRA, but
arguably it created a kind of institutional ambience in which the idea of an IRA
could more naturally engender and find receptivity.
In retrospect, we may hypothesise that the move towards the IRAs may be
pushed by jurisdictional conflicts, conflicts of interests and the need for functional
harmonisation and non-partisan performance as in the early USA, or by fiscal
overload and distortions and dysfunctionlaties as it happened in the wake of the
crisis of welfare states and social democratic regimes as well as those with con-
siderable social policy expenditures in various parts of the world during the late
1970s, the 1980s and the early 1990s. It all gathered momentum with the disinte-
gration of the Soviet Union and collapse of communism, the end of the Cold
War and capitalist globalisation that followed. The IRAs gained importance in the
Indian Journal of Public
Administration
64(3) vii–xix
© 2018 IIPA
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0019556118793474
http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ipa

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT