Reform the Reformer: Judge Administrative Reforms 3.0 by Trust and Devolution, Not Procedure

The Test of Reforms 3.0 Is Whether the State Trusts Its Citizens

TAN's position is simple: administrative reform in India stalls because it keeps targeting procedures rather than the state's habit of distrusting citizens. Administrative Reforms 3.0 should therefore be judged by two things: whether it hands real power to local governments and whether it presumes that citizens and businesses act in good faith.

Why Procedure Is Not Enough

India has reformed its procedures many times. The First Administrative Reforms Commission met in 1966; the Second, in 2005, focused on citizen-centric administration. In October 2026, Cabinet Secretary T.V. Somanathan began a third round by asking ministries to list their bottlenecks.

In his Indian Express column, Pratap Bhanu Mehta argues that a third round in a government's 12th year is itself a sign that earlier rounds did not change underlying conditions. He cites the IMF's 2025 Article IV report: firms in India face longer customs delays, managers spend more time on compliance, firm entry and exit rates are below 1 per cent against 8-13 per cent in comparable economies and about 15 per cent of sampled firms are zombie firms.

He also points to the government's own Economic Survey, which he reads as describing a business environment where rents, uneven enforcement and political mediation often outweigh competition. If those observations hold, the problem is not a missing rule.

It is a state that approaches citizens and firms as risks to be controlled. Simpler forms do not change that instinct; they only change the paperwork through which it operates.

The Strongest Objection

The government's defenders have a serious answer. The Jan Vishwas Act, 2023 decriminalised 183 provisions across 42 central laws, replacing jail terms with fines for minor violations. That is a direct expression of trust.

Chief Economic Adviser V. Anantha Nageswaran has repeatedly argued that India's digital public infrastructure has cut rent-seeking by replacing face-to-face discretion with rule-based digital delivery. On this view, the reformer has already been reformed.

Why the Position Holds

That objection is strong, but it proves less than it seems. The Jan Vishwas Act shows that trust-based reform is possible. It also shows that it has so far been applied selectively, to specific penalties in central laws, not as a general principle of how the state treats citizens.

And digital systems are not neutral. They remove discretion at the counter, but they can also concentrate data and control at the top. Mehta notes that the logical discrepancies used to flag voters in the electoral roll revision have become a wider mode of governance.

Technology can encode distrust as easily as it can remove it. Decentralisation is the clearest test. The 73rd and 74th Amendments created Panchayats and urban local bodies to bring governance closer to people. If Reforms 3.0 strengthens them with real funds and functions, it will show trust in action.

If it centralises further, it will repeat the pattern of earlier rounds.

Why This Matters for the Exam

Administrative reform is often taught as a list of commissions and schemes. The more useful insight for GS2 is that reform succeeds when it changes the state's attitude towards citizens, not only its procedures.