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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: research

Fresh Blood

30 Tue Jun 2015

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, South Asia

≈ Comments Off on Fresh Blood

Tags

archives, diplomacy, IFS, India, Indian Foreign Service, library, MEA, Ministry of External Affairs, PP&RD, Public Policy & Research Division, research

The Indian Ministry of External Affairs put out an announcement yesterday, advertising for consultants for its Policy Planning & Research Division. This followed several articles in the past two years criticising the limited manpower and hence expertise of the Indian Foreign Service and some recent speculation about the expansion of the Service via lateral entry into the cadre. The move has been welcomed by most and it can only be hoped that it is only the first in a series of moves that will revamp and energise India’s foreign affairs circles.

As several India observers have remarked already, the size of the IFS is remarkably small for a nation of India’s size and interests. To be fair, it is only recently that Delhi’s role on the world stage has grown; its growing economy has compelled India to make inroads in trade and security in all corners of the world. Furthermore, it cannot help but be more involved as its northeastern neighbour and rival drags the world’s economic centre of gravity back to Asia. South Block’s holiday during the post-Nehruvian slump years ended in the mid- to late 1990s though little was done to boost its capabilities until now.

The announcement, though a step in the right direction, is a short-term measure and leaves much to be desired. First, the advertisement seeks experts for a period of three years. Given that the hire is not into the IFS cadre, hierarchy and prospects for upward mobility on the job are unclear. Most applicants will therefore treat this as a line entry on their resume or a sabbatical from their “real” job. Such a temporal attitude hardly encourages the development of expertise in a field and the PP&RD will effectively be turned into a long workshop on government procedure and thinking.

Reaching out to domain experts – on regions as well as issues – is an excellent idea but the presumption is usually that this expertise is developed elsewhere and brought in on specific projects. In this manner, the MEA can augment its in-house expertise at will from a large pool of experts in industry and academia. Towards this end, as former foreign secretary Nirupama Rao has suggested most recently, an MEA think tank could be created. This group would be tasked with formulating position papers on a variety of key issues to provide the IFS with immediate expertise. The necessity of consultants would not be obviated because the manpower requirements for a think tank to remain at the forefront of research on all topics the external affairs ministry of a rising regional power  might be interested in would be gargantuan.

The Indian government must also understand that the entire system of consultants and think tanks depends on access to information. Policies have an administrative and political history and it is vital to take this into account as well as the contemporary goals of the state. Declassification of government files would greatly assist in developing foreign policy experts but any move on this front has been in dribs and drabs. For some unfathomable reason, every Indian bureaucrat I have met at home and abroad takes great pride in the state of the National Archives and the declassification process. Perhaps a visit to similar facilities in Germany or Britain may be in order to fully appreciate the capability of national archives and freedom of information.

India’s library collections, even in the metros, are also pitiable. Foreign publications are expensive for the Indian wallet and scholars cannot finance all their intellectual needs out of their own pockets. The sheer volume of research generated every year from even just the top institutions would require the salary of an entertainer or sportstar to keep up with. The development of just one world-class national library in each of India’s four or five largest cities – without borrowing privileges – would immeasurably improve access to international manuscripts and journals. As an example, Harvard University’s library system has approximately 19 million books and an annual operating budget of $160 million.

The MEA fails to realise that – or at least has chosen not to act on it yet – a pool of experts it can consult or develop in-house requires a nurturing environment of sound academic institutions, freedom of information, and access to data. These are the larger infrastructural problems that need to be addressed in the long-term. For now, the lateral hiring is a positive step. Let us hope it will be followed by a full spectrum of reforms and development soon.


This post appeared on FirstPost on July 02, 2015.

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A Lack of Capital

02 Tue Oct 2012

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, South Asia

≈ Comments Off on A Lack of Capital

Tags

governance, government, Henry Kissinger, India, intellectual capital, research, think tank

High office teaches decision-making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.

Henry Kissinger’s famous observation about the circle of power unnerves most people – how can politicians respond to an ever-changing world if they are incapable of innovative thinking to address increasingly difficult international crises? After all, as Kissinger also remarked of the international system, “each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.”

Upon closer examination, Kissinger’s point well-taken. Running a country is no easy task, and the sheer volume of files one has to read, speeches one has to give, and meetings one has to attend would leave little time for pontificating on abstruse philosophies of statehood and government or the Aristotelian influences on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Yet one cannot hope that all aspirants to high office will have advanced degrees in the humanities or sciences, nor is this necessarily desirable. Politicians have attempted to address this gap in two ways – the first is a staff that is competent in putting relevant ideas in front of a minister in an abridged format, and the second is relying upon the research done by think tanks and in universities. To facilitate this, advanced democracies ensure access to well-maintained archives of national records, periodic declassification, and access to government officials by researchers and journalists.

If it has not already, this should ring alarm bells for Indians. Not only does the country lack in erudite statesmen, but it also has no concept of an open society. The National Archives in India are a poor shadow of their sister institutions in Europe and the United States, holding a collection that is of only passing interest to scholars of diplomacy. Furthermore, India’s perverse social hierarchy restricts access to officials, few of whom are willing to or capable of divulging the practices of power in India. As a result, think tanks in India produce little of interest on New Delhi’s policies, let alone serve as a source for analysis of the policies of foreign governments.

Due to poor funding and frustrating regulations in India’s educations sector, there is not a single Indian university that stands out for an exceptional humanities programme. The average Indian’s aversion to the humanities has also hurt recruitment to the arts, but with poor faculty, atrocious library collections, a pervasive Marxist bias, and non-existent little opportunity in government or business, there is little to motivate young students to opt for the humanities over professional schools which will in all likelihood result in better-paying jobs.

India lacks not only a talent pool of young and budding humanities scholars but also the mindset to develop such a workforce. Recent articles that have suggested that the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) hire laterally to make up for the acute shortage of manpower they face sound like a major reform in the ossified bureaucracy of the Indian civil service. Indeed it is, but it is a little like buying a saddle for an imaginary horse – there are precious few scholars of policy being churned out in India and there is nothing to attract Indians in premier graduate programmes in the UK, US, and elsewhere to the IFS. Given the bleak scenario, it is not sure where the IFS is supposed to recruit laterally from, or if new lateral hires, probably not of the quality desired, would actually improve the functioning of the IFS or add to the already bloated state apparatus.

Another nugget of wisdom from Kissinger’s playbook suggests, “No foreign policy – no matter how ingenious – has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.” Without several think tanks, academic programmes, scholarly journals, and a transparent government, it is impossible to have a vibrant public sphere. This means that the Indian public is always left in the dark, limiting discussion to a handful of policy elites. To paraphrase from US political commentator James Carville, India’s newspaper headlines tell us everyday how the country is going to hell, and the editorial page sings paeans of failing government policies or dismisses every idea suggested to fix affairs; there is certainly little by way of interrogating government propaganda. This suits New Delhi very well, accustomed to working without outside scrutiny and little accountability. There is no need to re-state, however, how well that has worked for India.

Finally, there is the matter of the end user – the people. Too busy dealing with hostile tax regimes under welfarist governments, burdened poor educational, health, and transport infrastructure, pollution, corruption, and the failure of the police and judiciary, citizens find it difficult to inform themselves and question their political masters. Yet many find time to protest, or at least pontificate, on violence in Burma or the supposed insult to one of the many available icons of Indian society while showing no dissatisfaction over power cuts lasting for up to 12 hours in their cities. As Carter Eskew wrote, “The lack of innovation in politics and government is not just a supply problem; it’s a demand problem. We routinely settle for too little.”

All this is to reiterate that management of the country in the past 65 years has been so dismal that some things are beyond reforms alone. Government policies have created strange vectors in the nation-building project and state-building – beyond a labyrinthine bureaucracy – has not happened either (in fact, what little had occurred was systematically destroyed from the late 1960s onwards). In India, at least when it comes to policy-making, it is not only reforms that is needed but intellectual capital, and that is a decades-long project. As the 20th century’s iconic realpolitiker warned, “If you don’t know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.”

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