Ideally, the social contract of a free society should allow each generation the freedom to think for itself and create institutions of governance relevant to its needs. But our Constituent Assembly did not quite believe we could be trusted to make our own detailed laws. And so it paternalistically told us everything about how we should govern ourselves, including how we should run our public services. Our Constitution is extremely prescriptive; not focused on outcomes. Given that it is a Constitution and not an ordinary law, it becomes very hard to change its prescriptions. The jungle of detail found in our Constitution has made it very hard to modernize our governance. As a result, our governance structures have remained practically frozen as they were designed in 1950 (noting that many of these structures had roots in British India’s laws and institutions, going back into the 1850s. We are effectively forced to do today what the British had done 150 years ago!).

 

Countries with short and flexible constitutions have breezed through many experiments in governance and radically improved their governance. But in our case our 299 ‘wise’ people of 1949 still dictate to us how we shall do things for the next million years. ‘Thou shalt use a bullock cart even if thou art in a position to use jet engines or time machines’, they seem to be saying to us.