Day of the specialist

Public policy requirements of the 21st century demand a bureaucracy less generalist

IN 1921, A HARVARD medical school professor, Lawrence Henderson, wrote that medicine had crossed a “great divide” because “for the first time in human history a random patient with a random disease consulting a doctor at random stands a better than 50/50 chance of benefiting from the encounter”. In other words, knowledge, complexity and evidence in medicine had advanced to a point where it was better to be treated by physicians than to run in fear of them. India stands at a similar “great divide”: Generalists are more dangerous than specialists and the rising standards of human capital in public policy areas — education, healthcare, public finance, urbanisation — means we must stop equating bureaucrats with technocrats.

The most complex decision for any entrepreneur — social or business — is choosing between generalists and specialists because, as the American politician Mario Cuomo said, “You campaign in poetry but govern in prose”. Any effective organisation needs both; too much poetry, you get nothing done. Too much prose and you do nothing great. India’s current policy problems are very different from the nation-building challenge the country faced after Independence — job creation is an execution problem — and therefore equating bureaucrats with technocrats is wrong. The reasons are as follows: Politics is closer to poetry than to prose. The bureaucrat’s job is closer to writing prose than composing poetry; mostly implementing policy. But one needs to know a subject well enough to give inputs and also make them as simple as possible. Additionally, our binding constraint has shifted from the sins of commission (what the government does wrong) to the sins of omission (what the government does not do). This means outcomes need building coalitions, creating specialised knowledge, less hierarchy, more collaboration, domain networks and flatter professional