(This story originally appeared in on Mar 15, 2020)

New Delhi: India’s bureaucracy often suffers from a socialist overhang that leads it to slow down, even block reforms that the top leadership has sought to implement, former NITI Aayog vice chairman Arvind Panagariya has said in his latest book.He cites the government attempts to privatise a large number of public sector enterprises which have remained stalled despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi ’s push to get cabinet approval for the list of companies drawn up by the NITI Aayog.“But once the matter went to the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management ( DIPAM ), it remained stuck there,” Panagariya says in his book — ‘India Unlimited, Reclaiming the Lost Glory’, adding that labour law reforms offered another example of how the bureaucracy blocked efforts of the political executive.He says bureaucracy’s adherence to socialism remains deeply rooted in the education its members receive in Indian universities, where faculty members are often wedded to anti-business and anti-market ideology “Given the dream of an ideal world that the socialist ideology offers, the young are naturally drawn to it. This attraction is reinforced by antimarket ideas that their teachers in colleges impart them,” says Panagariya, who was the first vice chairman of NITI Aayog, a government think-tank that replaced Planning Commission.“A final example relates to the civil services reform. Prime Minister Modi has pushed for lateral entry at the top levels of the bureaucracy for several years. But going by publicly available information, it is a reasonable conclusion that bureaucracy slowed down the process to such a degree that it was only at the very end of his term that nine officers could be inducted from outside,” says Panagariya, who returned to academia and is a professor of economics at Columbia University.“Civil services in India pick up many among these youngsters (taught by Leftleaning faculties) at an early age. Once inside the government, they find themselves safely in the company of others like them for the remainder of their professional lives,” he says.The Columbia University professor also does not spare India Inc for the lethargy towards reforms.“Remarkably, in India even business leaders have played an insignificant role in pushing for market-friendly reforms. In most countries, businesses try to use an economic crisis as an opportunity to seek removal of regulations that impede their progress. But in India, they use a crisis as the opportunity to seek subsidies and protection from imports,” he says.“They want the government to intervene more, not less to save their specific sector or industry, With rare exceptions, even business organisations and associations, which are expected to represent the collective interest of business, have not bothered to push for pro-growth reforms,” Panagariya says.