Beyond the sarkari diktat

Book review of Method in the Madness: Insights from My Career as an Insider Outsider Insider

Niccolo Machiavelli wrote in The Prince, “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” Sardar Patel, India’s first home minister, called the Indian Bureaucracy the “steel frame” of the government machinery. Patel was referring to an organisation that was at the forefront, at the time of Independence, to steer economic and social development. By the 1980s, however, the bureaucracy was perceived as inept, a rusty cage rather than shiny steel, to be replaced by the