I wanted to be a brain surgeon but in north India it is customary to ask children to join the IAS. After a long discussion with my doctor uncle and bureaucrat father, I was successfully persuaded to skip medicine and go for the IAS. I did tell my father that I would stay in the IAS for only 10 years. I ended up staying for 18 years. But since six of these years were spent abroad in studies and two years in training, I suppose I did stay for just about 10 years.

In the end, my decision to leave the IAS was not made because of this earlier plan. It became the only option after seeing how rotten the system is from within.

Virtually within days of joining IAS in September 1982 I had come to understand that this may not be a place for good people. Many probationers were using their IAS “badge” as a dowry extracting tool. Rumours were rife of crores of rupees being extracted in dowry at a time when our monthly salary was Rs.1200.

Some fresh IAS recruits had previously worked in other central services. In a private moment one of them told me how he had already bought two flats in Mumbai in just two years in the income tax department. He had high expectations of the potential for money making in the IAS.

Later, in 1994, when I was Deputy Director at the National Academy in Mussoorie, one of the academics who teaches there told me that the ethical standards of probationers had dropped even further, with a good proportion now in the IAS purely for corruption.

Upon reaching the district in 1984 a vast number of instances of corruption quickly came to my notice – corruption at the highest level. I was told by one of the room-bearers of the Guwahati Circuit house that he had seen a suitcase full of cash in the room of a very senior Central Minister who was accompanying Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi for his Assam Accord discussions. And I personally saw hundred rupee notes being doled out at Chief Minister Hiteswar Saikia’s residence to all visitors from the villages: no receipts were being taken. How was so much cash floating around?

It didn’t take long before I was directly offered cash – this was in 1985 in Hojai. The offer was from a middleman representing a businessman whose foodgrains had been seized because these were being illegally smuggled out of the PDS system for the general market. The fact that I not only rejected this offer but took strong action against anyone indulging in corruption in my jurisdiction put a dramatic end to such offers, but then the demand for corruption came from the Chief Minister.

Around ten years after joining the IAS I was Assam’s Director of Rural Development. As part of my job, I had to purchase cement for schools, roads and other infrastructure. When the tenders came in, Hiteswar Saikia called me. He took me behind his office into the Cabinet room, sat me next to him and whispered into my ear, asking me to give the contract to a private cement company which didn’t have the lowest bid.

I went back to my office, had a close look at the papers and issued the contract to Cement Corporation of India, Bokajan, which had not only bid the lowest but to which I was required under existing preferential rules for public sector undertakings to give a price preference.

Within days I was transferred into a role that had no office. Thereafter, I was dumped into another role where the office had no facilities. This didn’t bother me because I was able to learn many new things in this job as State Inquiry Officer – about how the system allows corrupt IAS and IPS officers to escape accountability. That’s when I began to learn about the damage being caused by Part 14 of the Indian Constitution.

I had started researching into the causes of India’s misgovernance from 1984, two years after I joined the IAS. It took me 13 years of study (till mid-1997), including higher studies towards a PhD in the USA, to become clear about the causes of India’s problems. The answer in one word is: socialism.

Even then I didn’t think of leaving the IAS. But in February 1998 I was having a chat with a South Korean fellow student at the University of Southern California. He asked: how is it that you people are so intelligent (we were a handful of IAS officers studying for our PhD, and we all performed well in academics) and you also hold senior positions in India, so why is India in such a bad shape?

I instinctively pointed my finger at our politicians and said that they are extremely corrupt.

Later that night I realised that I can’t make such excuses to a foreigner. To my Korean friend, we are all Indians, after all. That night I decided that I had no choice but to fight these politicians through a political party that offers a dramatically improved system – based on the principles of liberty. I had to become the politician I wanted others to be.

I also became grateful that night to the corrupt politicians who are running our system. At least we are not a Syria, Pakistan or Afghanistan. The Hiteswar Saikias of India are doing the best they can within the constraints of our badly designed system.

And so that night I put out a couple of paragraphs on the internet “creating” a hypothetical “Victory of India” party. Just that act led to a series of events, including my leaving IAS, which finally led to a real liberal party – Swarna Bharat Party – being registered in June 2014. As the saying goes, “What you can do, or dream you can, begin it; boldness has genius, power and magic in it”.

Till 2007 I used to think that the IAS could be salvaged, and that’s what I wrote in an opinion piece in the Times of India. But further thought has persuaded me that the IAS must go. We need an entirely new and modern bureaucracy that is paid well but is fully accountable.