Jawaharlal Nehru’s Vision for Citizen-centric Administration
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/22308075231177032 |
| Author | Naved Ashrafi |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
Jawaharlal Nehru’s
Vision for Citizen-
centric Administration
Naved Ashrafi1
Abstract
After Independence from the British rule, India adopted a new Constitution in
1950 framed by the Constituent Assembly. Under the leadership of Jawaharlal
Nehru as the first Prime Minister, India followed the path of ‘democratic social-
ism’ to establish the ‘socialistic pattern of society’. Though Nehru started with a
new vision and vigour, yet he was left with a traditional administrative machinery
inherited from the colonial era. Nehru wanted to overhaul the Indian Civil Service
(ICS) machinery to suit the objectives of new India by making it more citizen-
centric and more participatory, and constituted the Indian Administrative Service
(IAS) in its place. This article tries to outline the vision of Nehru for a citizen-
centric public administration. The article analyses the role of the Preamble to the
Constitution and Nehru’s Objectives Resolution in defining popular moorings
and sanctions for public administration. Delineating major colonial inheritances
in the administrative machinery, the article in its later part, analyses Nehru’s
thoughts on citizen-centric administration, especially focusing on a human touch
in Indian public administration.
Keywords
Citizen-centric administration, Indian administration, Nehru’s administrative
thought, public administration in India
Introduction
In the erstwhile State of Bihar, on a promising evening of 15 October 1955,
Jawaharlal Nehru pressed an electric button and what followed was a torrential
amount of water gushing out of a recently erected dam in Hazaribagh District. To
Nehru, it was a ‘red-letter day’ in the calendar of new India as hundreds of people
Article
Indian Journal of Public
Administration
69(3) 584–596, 2023
© 2023 IIPA
Article reuse guidelines:
in.sagepub.com/journals-permissions-india
DOI: 10.1177/22308075231177032
journals.sagepub.com/home/ipa
1
Public Administration Section, Directorate of Distance Education, Maulana Azad National Urdu
University, Hyderabad, Telangana, India.
Corresponding author:
Naved Ashrafi, Public Administration Section, Directorate of Distance Education, Maulana Azad
National Urdu University, Hyderabad, Telangana 500032, India.
E-mail: mail@navedashrafi.com
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