By News18,Sriram Balasubramanian
Copyright news18
I had written a piece earlier on importance of GST’s success and the institutional excellence of economic entities in Bharat which has flourished in the last few decades. The feedback to the piece was overwhelmingly positive and many people felt that more such institutional features must be highlighted that have had a positive influence on Bharat’s story. This led me to contemplate further on this subject. In the pursuit of Viksit Bharat, there have been significant initiatives which have bolstered our institutional capacity and the knowledge frontier in this regard. The secret sauce to their success lies in its customisation to Bharat’s socio-cultural fabric.
The Finance Commission of India (FCI) was established in 1950 under Article 280 of the Indian Constitution. It’s a constitutional body that is catered particularly to represent and also assimilate the diverse polity in Bharat, including balancing the Center-state relations for national unity and development along with federalism and diversity. Its mandate covers mainly fiscal transfers between the union and states with focus on tax devolution, grants-in-aid, augmenting state finances along with looking at fiscal positions of states and performance linked grants. Not only does it play an institutional balance between the center and the states, it uses a dynamic formula that encompasses a wide range of criteria to ensure equity and effectiveness in transfers. Its integration with local bodies, especially the post-1990s, paved the way for recommending transfers to panchayats and local bodies which embeds the concept of federalism in Bharat’s context even further. There is rarely a global comparison of an institution that is a recurring independent constitutional body, covers the scale and federalism it covers (28 states and 8 Union Territories), integrates with customised local bodies and is by and large independent in its functioning.
One of the most important recent efforts has been the Capacity Building Commission (CBC) and its work in boosting institutional capacity in Bharat across the bureaucracy. CBC facilitates a competency-driven and continuous learning approach to train civil servants with a citizen-centric approach. CBC’s products include annual capacity building plans (ACBPs), supporting central training institutes (CTIs) and the flagship scheme ‘Mission Karmayogi’ which promotes continuous learning and a shift from rule-based to role-based training.
Rashtriya Karmayogi Jan Seva programme was launched in March 2025 and aims to provide training courses for civil servants across the various levels of bureaucracy with a focus on competency and Bharat centric training courses. I had the privilege of delivering a lecture as part of the ‘Mission Karmayogi’ lecture series on Dharmanomics and the of cultural norms and narratives in public policy. The flagship scheme titled ‘Mission Karmayogi’ has been a very important developmental tool to build institutions through an indigenous and customised lens that suits the dynamics of Bharat. It enables policymakers to get exposure to a wide range of experts from various domains with varied perspectives on public policy and the importance of a more diversified perspective to institutional development.
Similarly, one of the most transformative features of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has been the integration of Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) into various aspects of the Indian education system. This has to led to a vast enhancement in both research and publications from IKS across many conventional science and arts streams. In many of the top IITs and IIMs, IKS courses are becoming increasingly popular as the awareness among Gen Z has increased substantively on these areas. Furthermore, it also has created an important impetus to look at our ancient past while searching for important solutions in the present and the future as well. There are various other examples to this effect, including the Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) and others that have been transformed the innovative capabilities of the common person by attuning to entrepreneurship to the local needs of the populace.
In each of these cases, it’s pertinent to note that the success of institutions (young or old) lies in its ability to connect with the socio-cultural fabric of Bharat and its unique governance issues at the grassroots level. While there are a variety of factors for institutional success, Asian countries tend to have more effectiveness when public policy is aligned to socio-cultural fabric of the country. Countries such as China and Japan pay heed to such nuances for many of their institutions. Bharat’s successful examples also illustrate the importance of customising policies and institutions and aligning them to local needs for them to be successful in the short and long run.
Sriram Balasubramanian is an economist and best-selling author of Dharmanomics and Kautilyanomics for modern times. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
