Indian Colonial Service: Maybe we could begin with a change in nomenclature

THE GHOST OF Thomas Babington Macaulay hasn't left India, even though he has been dead for 165 years and spent only four years of his life in the country. Macaulay, like many of his elite countrymen at the time, was an unabashed colonialist. His claim to infamy is his stated goal to create a class of people who were Indian in blood but Western in their thinking, and perhaps most importantly, fluent in English. Arguably, there are two legacies of the Empire that have outlasted almost 80 years of British departure-the English language and the civil service. It's worth asking which of the two has been more damaging for independent India. The argument that Macaulay's education system ended up creating a class of deracinated Indians is true. But it's not the only impact that a Western education had. The freedom movement was mostly led by people who were products of that very education system. Many of them subsequently studied in the UK as well. Remember that, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the West was ground for competing ideas and ideologies; there was colonialism, of course, which was dominant, but there was also Marxism (implemented in post-Czarist Russia), capitalism (post-colonial America), Nazism (interwar Europe), among others.

The left-leaning, areligious Nehru and his deracinated followers are the ones who are the subject of contemporary criticism. However, there were others like Gandhi and Sardar Patel who were also educated in the same system but were more rooted in Indian traditions. On the rightwing, Savarkar and Hedgewar studied in English-language or British-founded institutions.

So did noted thinkers in the Indian tradition like Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo. It wasn't an English education alone but other ideological influences which determined the relative rootedness of the prominent personalities of the time. English may have enabled various strands of the freedom struggle more than we may like to admit.

Today, English is not a liability. It's an asset, a great economic advantage for India. Our only truly global industry and biggest contributor to exports, IT, would not have existed without English. And as the world enters a new era of AI and associated technologies, English will again be a comparative advantage for India. If anything, the failure to properly educate every Indian after Independence (including in the knowledge of English) has been a drag on the country's prospects, not Macaulay's ignoble mission.

The other legacy of the British that has been a liability for India's post-independence economic trajectory is the structure of the civil service. Like Macaulay, the founders of the Imperial Civil Service had a clear intention- to create a structure that would enable a small number of Englishmen to administer a country as large as India. Naturally, the primary objectives were to stamp the authority of the British rulers and collect taxes to finance the Empire. Development was not even a remote consideration. The infrastructure built by the British, like the Railways, was in self-interest, for the movement of troops and goods (usually raw materials eventually shipped to England).

Amazingly, the structure the British left behind is remarkably unchanged. The administrators of districts in many parts of India are still called "collectors". Other nomenclatures include the powerful-sounding deputy commissioner. These men and women, 700-odd, essentially rule each of India's districts. Perhaps, it is time for at least the nomenclature to change: How about chief development officer? An even better reform would be to do away with that office and allow elected officials to run redefined units of government-like cities and villages, rather than districts-with decentralisation of authority and finance, of course. But the British institutional legacy comes with centralisation at its core.

The economy is also ill-served by a state that continues to dictate terms to the private sector and civil society. Since control is institutional DNA, over-regulation is the usual outcome, limiting economic dynamism. India has taken away the power and influence of Nehru's deracinated classes, but it still tolerates that other damaging legacy-a highly controlling bureaucracy.