An insight into working of India’s bureaucracy
LUCKNOW: Retired IAS officer Yogendra Narain’s just-released book is already being talked about beyond bureaucratic circles in Uttar Pradesh.
The book ‘Born to Serve: Power Games in Bureaucracy’, though an account of Narain’s 42 years of experience as a bureaucrat, gives a bold and lucid insight into how India’s bureaucracy works. It took him over three years to pen down his experience.
Narain’s experience as a civil servant was so extensive that the publishers asked him to write.
“They (publisher) asked me. But I did not write it then because I was still the secretary general of Rajya Sabha. I wrote the book after that final stint in bureaucracy,” he said.
Dr Narain has been the defence secretary of India and the chief secretary of Uttar Pradesh. He was the man who set up the Greater Noida Industrial Authority and also the National Highway Authority of India.
Narain has written the book in a simple, elegant and mostly anecdotal manner that may appeal to a book lover who has not read about the bureaucracy before. As a reader would start the book, they would first get a glimpse of how the life generally is at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration for a trainee officer. Then he goes on to describe the beginning the service without which the government can’t function. His stints in different cities like Aligarh, Mirzapur, Kanpur or Lucknow.
Narain had been a bureaucrat from 1965 to 2007, a large and the most defining period of bureaucracy and government in the country post-Independence. He has shared facts and views on many defining moments in the country’s history while he saw them as a part of it. As the defence secretary, he has thrown light on how the ministry functions, the attack on Parliament by the militants and the aftermath or the inner working of Parliament that he saw from the close quarters as the secretary general of Rajya Sabha.
In the book, he has also made some interesting revelations on the demolition of the disputed structure in Ayodhya as he was in UP when the structure was pulled down. Towards the last chapters in the book, Narain writes: “On September 15th, 2007, I demitted the office of Secretary-General Rajya Sabha. A resolution was adopted by the entire Rajya Sabha commending my services to the House.”