Q.Write 200-word essay on proposal for elected administration instead of appointed administration.
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →Replacing appointed civil servants with an elected administration is not a sound proposal — administration requires technical expertise, continuity, and political neutrality that periodic elections cannot reliably deliver, and the chapter's own design (merit-based UPSC/State PSC recruitment, All-India Services, professional bureaucracy under ministerial and legislative control) already achieves the accountability the proposal is reaching for, without sacrificing competence.
The case for the proposal would be that elected officials are directly answerable to voters, and this is meant to solve the very problems the chapter itself lists — bureaucratic insensitivity to ordinary citizens, and fear of approaching government officers. If administrators had to face election, the argument would go, they would be forced to be more responsive.
But this proposal misunderstands what the administrative machinery is actually for. As the chapter explains, the executive already has an elected, accountable layer — the Prime Minister/Chief Minister and the Council of Ministers, who are elected (or drawn from elected legislators) and who bear the overall responsibility of government policy. The bureaucracy exists as a separate, permanent layer precisely because implementing policy competently requires trained and skilled officers, continuity across changes of government, and — crucially — political neutrality, so that when a government loses an election, the same administrative machinery can faithfully implement the new government's different policies. An elected administrator would, by contrast, have won office on a political platform and would have every incentive to favour supporters over the general public — undermining the neutral, merit-based service the Constitution's makers deliberately built through the UPSC and State Public Service Commissions.
Elections every few years are also a poor mechanism for testing technical competence (unlike a competitive examination), and would make routine administration hostage to electoral cycles and populist pressure, rather than professional judgement — exactly the risk the chapter flags when it warns that too much political interference can turn officials into instruments of politicians. …
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