In India, public service is theoretically in the hands of elected leaders and the task of ope-rationalizing and executing the plans are practically in the hands of bureaucrats and govt. officials. Such a massive task of executing tens and hundreds of crores of development activities are in the hands of these people. And at the ground level, many of these bureaucrats have an average qualification or exposure to best practices and innovation in operations management or planning or the practices of collaborator in social/public projects. (leaving aside very few candidates with very good credentials entering the services these days) Although, govt. do have experts of these at highest level of policy framing and policy monitoring in forms of planning commission or various other commissions.
At the same time, there are literally thousands of bright stars who are graduating and post graduating from best to average colleges and working in various Indian and MNC firms. And there only aim is to have fat cheque at end of month, have decent lifestyle and metro culture. Although many of them are capable of qualifying for govt. bureaucracy but rarely do they bother about that on many grounds. Corruption, political pressure, remote location, lack of will power to serve society in large, meagre probability of success in qualifying examination and above all the most diminishing factor to bright candidates is lack of innovation opportunity in such jobs. And only one who used to prepare or have motivation to enter this field is because of huge power vested to these bureaucrats, social prestige associated with that. Also most of these students are from areas where importance to power is known over innovation and money.
Well, there are restrictions in this public service job, but also there are freedom to implement projects and policies at ground zero level. And taking consideration of shoddy states of affair, there is great scope for improvement. You may not change the system, but you can surely establish a university or a hospital taking help of private firms CSR initiatives by acting as a collaborator. You may not control the corruption in system but you can definitely improve the grievance redressal mechanism by ICT initiatives. You may not change the ethics of govt. employees but you can definitely input practices of operation management in ensuring timely delivery of projects deliverable. Opportunity is immense, only thing needed is candidates who are motivated towards innovation in public distribution and public service and obviously who see his smile in the satisfied face of destitute ones.
