Will ai permit resizing of the government
Just like computerisation did.
Downsizing made India what it is today
Else we would be another Pakistan.
In 1991, I got to work on a spreadsheet that tried to answer one basic question, “can computerisation help to downsize the govt”.
Few leaders can even think of such a question, forget find a solution.
The logical answer was YES.
Now the issue was “By how much and when”. It was a question for accountants but one that landed on the desktop of an engineer. And that too an engineer who grew up in Bombay and went to IIT Bombay. No one in IITB really aspired to join civil services. It wasn’t aspirational. Entrepreneurship was. IAS was a scam. Or so Bombayites thought.
In excel in those days, one worked with very little data. It was mostly the authors judgement presented as a quantitative model.Regression helped generate numbers.
In this case, the author was a IIT Bombay engineer who had the spreadsheet. It ran to 12,000+ rows. It used macros. It hyperlinked. And remember this was all before Windows 95 and the Internet. Dot matrix printers still ruled. In the end the shear weight of printouts was very impressive.
And the greatest reform in the history of independent India happened because no one in the govt then knew how to challenge this spreadsheet. The economist FM wanted to reduce expenditure to reduce deficit. This spreadsheet was perfect for the job.
A tome which no one could comprehend.
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Post-1991, India deliberately shrank the administrative pipeline. It was a conscious reform choice.
The numbers tell the story 👇
• 1975–84: ~120 IAS/year — licence-raj governance
• 1985–91: ~140/year — peak state control
• 1992–97: conscious intake reduction
• 1998–2003: ~50–70/year — the leanest Indian state
• 2004–07: cautious recalibration
• 2012–present: ~180/year – big mistake
The 1990s logic was sound:
➡️ Fewer officers reduce discretion and delay
➡️ Rules and competition replace control
➡️ The state regulates, it doesn’t run businesses
And, it worked.
Growth accelerated.
Entrepreneurship exploded.
The government stopped trying to manage everything. It had no people. The more the heads, more the nuisance.
You can’t liberalise an economy and keep expanding a bureaucracy designed to control it.
The real question isn’t whether the cut was right. That depends on who you ask.
It’s whether today we are re-engineering the state — or simply scaling it up again.
Ai is here. Do we need the IAS at all.
Actually NO
We just need our own sovereign AI BharatGen. Our PM Narendra Modi got this right. Very fast.
If the cadre had not been downsized in 1992, India would be like Pakistan is. A corruption prone state continuously bankrupt. Corruption money is Pakistan’s largest export. Havala banks thrive. In India, they shut shop.
This is one decision that India never thanked the then PM for. Or ever understood the strong stand the BJP govt took from 1999-2004.
hashtag#EconomicReforms hashtag#Governance hashtag#IAS
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2026