India's Governance Crisis: A Call for Capacity Building

New Delhi, India Jul 25, 2026 ALN: The recent scenes around Jantar Mantar have been disturbing. Every May, lakhs of young Indians queue outside examination centres carrying the anxieties of entire families on their backs. In May 2026, nearly 2.8 million of them were told to queue again. A leaked question paper had forced the National Testing Agency to order the largest re-test in the history of Indian competitive examinations. It was not the first such collapse, and it will not be the last. What failed that week was not a question paper. It was the state’s basic ability to keep a secret, guard a process, and deliver what it had promised on a specific date to a specific citizen.

This is the argument I want to place before readers, and one I am now developing into a full-length book: India’s deepest crisis is not, at its root, a crisis of democracy. It is a crisis of capacity. We have built one of the more elaborate constitutional architectures in the world — an independent judiciary, statutory regulators, a federal structure, a vast schema of rights and welfare schemes. What we have not built, in equal measure, is the administrative muscle to execute any of it reliably. And it is in the widening gap between promise and delivery that our disillusionment, our communal anger, and our creeping tolerance for authoritarian shortcuts all find room to grow.

Form without function
B.R. Ambedkar’s warning to the Constituent Assembly in 1949 deserves to be read again, not as history but as a live diagnosis. He cautioned that political democracy in India could remain a thin, ornamental layer sitting atop a society that stayed fundamentally undemocratic beneath it. Substitute “capacity” for “democracy” in that sentence and it reads like a description of the republic today: elaborate constitutional form, resting on administrative soil that has never been properly tilled.

Political scientists usually break state capacity into three kinds: the capacity to enforce rules, the capacity to design and deliver policy through a competent bureaucracy, and the capacity to raise and spend public money wisely. India’s peculiar tragedy is that it holds wildly uneven amounts of each in different corners of the same state. Our capital markets regulator functions with genuine credibility. Our telecom regulator manages one of the most complex spectrum environments anywhere. Meanwhile, rural public health, monitored under mission-mode programmes for two decades now, remains defined by vacant posts, broken supply chains, and clinics nobody has staffed. Building a digital payments network or a biometric identity platform is not the same achievement as building the human and institutional capacity to actually deliver a service at the other end of it. Infrastructure is not delivery. We have confused the two for years.

Fifty-five million and counting
Nowhere is the gap starker than in our courts. By March 2026, the backlog across Indian courts had crossed 55.8 million cases, a number rising faster than judges can be recruited or appointed. India has roughly 21 judges per million citizens, against a recommendation made decades ago of 50. In a bitter irony, government itself is the single largest litigant, responsible for roughly half the cases clogging the system it is supposed to be administering. When justice takes a generation to arrive, it has not been delayed. It has been functionally denied. A citizen who has waited twenty years for a land dispute to be resolved does not experience this as an abstract “capacity deficit.” He experiences it as a republic that has quietly walked away from him.

Consider, too, water and disaster. Every monsoon we relearn the same lesson. In June 2026, a flash flood tore through a hydropower site in Arunachal Pradesh; neither the meteorological department nor the water commission appears to have anticipated it. Across the country, our cities generate far more sewage than they can treat, and citizens quietly plug the gap with private borewells and water tankers — mistaking the failure of a public system for a private lifestyle choice. We do not lack engineers, rainfall data, or river-basin science. We lack the institutional habit of preparing before a crisis rather than performing heroism during one, and of building regulatory frameworks — for floodplains, for river space, for early warning — with the same energy we reserve for the rescue operation afterward.

Even the architecture of the Union itself often reads more like an instrument of control than of governance. President’s Rule has been invoked well over a hundred times since Independence, disproportionately as a tool of political convenience rather than genuine constitutional necessity. A republic that reaches for the suspension of elected government as its preferred instrument of “efficiency” has confused control with competence, and it should not surprise us that the confusion has outlasted the individual governments that indulged it.

Closer home
Nowhere does this argument land closer to home than here in Jammu and Kashmir. We have lived for decades inside the gap between announcement and delivery — recruitment examinations cancelled and re-cancelled, flood warnings arriving after the water, an elected government whose administrative writ is narrower than its electoral mandate. When New Delhi speaks of “good governance” for this Union Territory, the fair question is not whether the intention is sincere. It is whether the institutional muscle exists to carry that intention through — a functioning bureaucracy answerable to the elected government, a judiciary that can clear its own backlog, a disaster-preparedness system that does not wait for the next flood to discover its own gaps. Capacity, not intention, is the honest measure of governance here as much as anywhere else in this Republic.

The authoritarian trap
There is a temptation, once this diagnosis is accepted, to reach for a dangerous shortcut — to conclude that democracy itself is the obstacle, and that a more centralised, less accountable state would simply function better. This is a trap, and a familiar one. Efficient authoritarianism is not the cure for a flailing democracy; it is what a flailing democracy becomes once its citizens stop believing that reform is possible through consent. The honest answer to weak capacity is not less democracy. It is a state professional and insulated enough — in its regulators, its judiciary, its civil service recruitment — to make democratic consent worth giving in the first place.

Rebuilding the Indian republic’s capacity — professionalising bureaucratic recruitment, insulating regulators from political capture, funding the judiciary as though justice mattered, devolving real fiscal power to states rather than symbolic power alone — is not a technical footnote to the larger project of Indian democracy. It is the project itself. Until we take institutional capacity as seriously as we take our elections, we will keep mistaking the ceremony of governance for governance itself and calling the difference between the two somebody else’s problem to solve.

The writer is a retired Indian Army officer and strategic analyst. This essay is drawn from his forthcoming book, “The Republic Without Capacity: Reflections on Governance.”