Not decided in the kitchen! Technocracy and the regulatory-welfare politics of India’s Direct Benefits Transfer reform

AuthorSrinivas Yerramsetti
Published date01 December 2021
Date01 December 2021
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/0020852319873708
Subject MatterArticles
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Not decided in the
kitchen! Technocracy and
the regulatory-welfare
politics of India’s Direct
Benefits Transfer reform
Srinivas Yerramsetti
Rutgers University Newark, USA
Abstract
Public policies designed to advance governance reform without the corresponding legal
frameworks that secure democratic values can exacerbate the power imbalance
between the government and the policies’ targets. This article discusses India’s post-
liberalization changes through the governance paradigms of New Public Management
and technocracy. Using the case of Direct Benefits Transfer reform, it traces the emer-
gence of technocracy as a governance paradigm. It discusses the implications of
technocracy’s complementarity with contemporary populism for the restructuring
of social citizenship. It makes a case for a neo-Weberian transformation through a
renewed commitment to a legal approach to public administration in order to reinforce
the public’s faith in the role of the administrative state as an instrument of emancipation
and social progress.
Points for practitioners
Public administration, especially in non-Western contexts, is characterized by the
prioritization of managerial innovations in government over the establishment of
legal frameworks. In that context, this article illustrates two central points for
practitioners:
The powers of delegated legislation should be exercised transparently and by
establishing a clear relationship to the formally stated policy objectives.
Corresponding author:
Srinivas Yerramsetti, Rutgers University Newark — School of Public Affairs and Administration,
111 Washington Street, Newark, New Jersey 07102, USA.
Email: sy364@scarletmail.rutgers.edu
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
!The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0020852319873708
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
2021, Vol. 87(4) 908–924
The operations of the administrative state should be structured in order to advance
the goals of both distributive and procedural justice.
Keywords
administrative law, developing countries, India, populism, rule of law, social citizenship,
technocracy
Introduction
Globally, support for democratic systems is on the wane while representative
institutions at all levels face the challenge of measuring up to public expectations.
At the same time, governments, especially in emerging democracies, have
embraced managerial innovations without a corresponding shift away from the
“inherited structural, normative and behavioral formations” of the colonial heri-
tage, characterized by governing norms such as centralization, paternalism, secre-
cy, and the distrust of citizens (Haque, 1997: 432–433). In this context, it is useful
to examine the implications of this imbalance between managerial approaches and
the rule of law for public administration in India.
The concept of an administrative state describes a “form of democratic gover-
nance where democratic institutions paradoxically share power with special polit-
ical roles based on expertise and the workings of administrative institutions”
(Perry and Christensen, 2015: 1). In post-colonial societies like India, the admin-
istrative state pre-dates the emergence of a constitutional republic. This article
analyzes the progress, or lack thereof, in the operations of the administrative
state to empower the public sphere.
This article attempts to use the explanatory power of public administration
theories to “account for the continuously changing properties and problems
faced by governments as they seek to implement public policies” (Riggs, 1991:
473). To that end, it undertakes a deliberative policy analysis, whose def‌ining
features are that it is interpretive, deliberative, and practitioner-oriented (Hajer
and Wagenaar, 2003: 16–21). This article integrates various theories, perspectives,
and empirical evidence in support of its normative analysis to account for the
emergence and implications of technocracy as a governing paradigm in India.
This article is structured as follows. It f‌irst contextualizes the recent political
debates about social citizenship in India. The second section focuses on Indian
public administration’s role in furthering neoliberal politics through the New
Public Management (NPM) governance paradigm. The third section draws upon
the theory of late-modern technocracy (Esmark, 2016) to identify how technocracy
emerges as a distinct governance paradigm by the end of the f‌irst decade of the 21st
century. The fourth section discusses the implications of this governing paradigm
and its complementarity with populism in leading to “technocratic citizenship.”
909
Yerramsetti

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