"India keeps reading its governance failures as a problem of bad people. The real driver is a structural condition that makes good officials afraid to decide — and it can be fixed."

A protest that began with a remark and a hashtag has, in a matter of weeks, become a movement larger on Instagram than India’s established parties. It has fastened on a real wound — the cancelled and leaked National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), which has forced more than two million students to sit the examination again. The demand is the oldest in politics: that heads should roll.

A familiar, flawed diagnosis

Behind that demand lies a diagnosis so familiar it is rarely examined — that government fails because the people running it are corrupt or incompetent, and so the cure is to replace them. Sometimes that is exactly right: a venal official should be removed, and prosecuted. But as a general explanation of why the Indian state underperforms, it is not so much wrong as incomplete, and the missing part is the larger one.

Our chronic failure is less the theft we occasionally prosecute than the decision that is never taken — the rational choice of capable, honest officials not to act. This is not a failure of individual character so much as a structural condition: good people responding sensibly to a system that makes deciding dangerous. The distinction matters, because you cannot punish your way out of a condition. You can only redesign it.

That choice has a logic, and behavioural economists have mapped it. People feel a loss more keenly than an equivalent gain, and they judge harm caused by action far more harshly than identical harm caused by inaction — an asymmetry the psychologist Daniel Kahneman spent a career documenting. A bureaucracy turns that instinct into procedure. It scrutinises the decision an officer made, and almost never the decision she quietly withheld.

Why good officers choose to do nothing

Watch any desk in government. An officer has a file before her; the law permits the decision and the facts support it. She also knows that if she signs and the outcome is later questioned, the audit objection, the inquiry and the vigilance case will attach to her — while the officer who referred the file sideways, sought one more clarification, or simply let it age will face nothing at all.

This is neither laziness nor stupidity. It is intelligent self-protection inside a system that punishes action and rewards stillness. The rules deepen the reflex: every new rule, written to reassure us after the last scandal, adds interpretive complexity; complexity invites a reference “for clarification”; each reference adds friction, until the simplest decision crawls past a dozen desks before anyone will own it.

Even prodigious talent fails when it misreads this. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, launched in the United States in 2025 with the boldest mandate in a generation, went after the symptoms the corruption-and-incompetence lens makes visible — headcount, contracts, the official footprint — and folded within the year. It shed the officers who knew how to move a file and kept those who had survived by moving none. The operator changed; the operating system won.

The hidden bill

The cost of all this is enormous, and it is invisible. By data assembled from the government’s own publications — delayed projects, unspent allocations, the dead weight of clearance — India forgoes something close to two per cent of its GDP every year, roughly ₹6 lakh crore, to decisions that were ready and never released. That is several times the Union health budget, lost annually to files that no one would sign.

Behind the abstraction sit real people: the contractor paid eighteen months late for a road already built; the family whose acquisition compensation, sanctioned and recorded in the file, waits eleven weeks for a signature that nobody refuses and nobody gives. The student made to sit her examination twice is only the most visible victim of a system that owns no outcome. None of it registers as a scandal, because the loss never appears on any balance sheet. It is a value that was ready, and quietly never delivered.

The fix already exists — we need only scale it

The remedy is not better human beings; it is a safer decision environment, in which acting in good faith is the prudent course and sitting still is the costly one. India has already built every part of it.

Clear, published standards turn judgement into compliance: a Passport Seva Kendra now settles in minutes what discretion once dragged out for months, and the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) moves billions of transactions on a single transparent rule. Give every outcome a single, named owner. Allow deemed consent, so that silence becomes assent rather than an indefinite veto. Above all, create a safe harbour — a written assurance that an officer who decides honestly and to a published standard will be judged on the process she followed, not punished for a result that hindsight finds wanting.

Protection alone would merely license drift, so it must be matched by consequence. Tie an officer’s annual appraisal to the deadlines citizens are already promised under right-to-service laws, and track every file’s journey, as the government’s own PRAGATI dashboard tracks stalled projects, so that delay is seen before it hardens into scandal. None of this needs a new ministry, a new law or a larger budget. It needs only that someone own each outcome, and be shielded while they deliver it.

Turn the anger into design

That leaves the street, whose energy is too valuable to squander. Movements that swell in days often lack the organisation to convert a moment into a mandate, and disperse as quickly as formed; outrage spreads because it is built to spread, not because it is built to fix. The answer is not less anger, but better-aimed anger.

A citizen is not a customer of the state but a part-owner of it. A generation fluent in coordination could turn its fury into design — convening a public contest to build a leak-proof, owned, end-to-end-tracked examination and recruitment system, and petitioning the government to adopt it. Diagnose the problem correctly, then design the fix.

The lesson is narrow, and unglamorous. A state is not mended by changing the people at the top, but by changing the conditions under which everyone beneath them decides. To demand a new face is satisfying, and it has seldom worked. To rewire the office is dull — and it is the only thing that ever has! / DAILY WORLD /

( The writer is a former Director General of Police, Haryana, and the author of the forthcoming book “Fear Tax: Decision Velocity for Viksit Bharat”)