Indian and Chinese officials plan to train together and exchange best practices on reforms
Two of the world’s biggest bureaucracies — India and China — have begun an effort to share their experiences of carrying out administrative reforms and to jointly train their civil servants, following talks between the two governments here this week. In an effort to share “best practices” — more sensitive issues such as the rampant corruption plaguing both governments have been kept off the table, for now — both countries have decided to come together to learn about each other’s experiences in carrying out administrative reforms within two of the world’s most complicated and vast bureaucratic systems.
Union Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions V. Narayanasamy and Chinese Minister for Human Resources Yin Weimin held day-long talks on Tuesday that covered a range of issues from assessing the performance of officials to social security and the functioning of the public sector in both countries.
China has offered to host Indian civil servants at the Chinese Academy of Personnel Sciences for training, while India will similarly choose an institution to host young Chinese bureaucrats. A delegation from India will visit China in May to kick-start the process, while officials from Beijing will travel to India in November. China’s vast bureaucracy — a source of increasing criticism from some quarters here on account of its opacity — is more than three times the size of India’s, employing 3.7 crore officials in the Centre and provinces. While talks on expanding cooperation are at an early stage, Mr. Narayanasamy said he was particularly struck by the Chinese approach to training civil servants. Here, officers are only trained intensively for five months before taking up their jobs, compared to a two-year period in India.
A very good idea. It would be great if the two countries are willing to critically study the systems in some well developed countries such as Germany, Holland, Finland and Sweden with very efficient administrative systems but with distinctive characteristics. Adapting best practices from such administrative systems and integrating them to our own probably would be the best way to achieve the transformation to a relatively corruption free and efficient bureaucracy.
The corruption as we have seen and known since long is something to our system like a leech. There have been huge cry over it since long and we have seen lots of agitations, even a party formation against the cause of removal of the plague. The effort mentioned above, taken by the government is praiseworthy, but how much effective it will be even a kid might know. The situation in our country is such that we need serious attitude towards corruption. We need stringent laws, sudden crackdowns of corrupt officials. I fail to understand why govt is not doing this. How could any govt take such a moderate view and work for it? It is absolutely unbelievable unless the govt has its own back to protect. I do not see any other reason to ignore corruption, everybody in govt or at least substantial group of politicians, also people outside the govt has to be corrupt to any govt ignore the framing of tough laws for corruption.Babus and politicians are always hand in glove.
A lot of knowledge about the ins and outs of bureaucracy from Germany and France has come to us via USA. Several scholars of organizational behavior have studied in USA. Some of them are teaching in institutes of higher education there. We regularly get books and journals from the western countries. Exchange of teachers and practitioners is also in place. These are available for us in English. However, there are wide gaps between theory and practice. China has a very old system of administration. We do not know much about it. The proposed interaction between bureaucrats from India and China would be very useful. Available literature in this field should be translated by them into English, and made available on the internet. We do not have many qualified translators for this purpose. The proposed interaction would be highly useful.
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