In August 2014, the government set up an Expenditure Management Commission and asked economist Bimal Jalan to find ways to cut its own spending. The commission’s recommendations, submitted in December 2015, were not made public; nor do we know about their impact. Four years later, a second Jalan Committee was formed to assess how much of the RBI’s reserves could be transferred to the government. The central bank has transferred Rs 2.87 lakh crore this year, and over Rs 12 lakh crore since 2019. One Jalan committee tried to make the government spend less. The other simply made its balance sheet look neater.
Governance requires performance; politics finds ways to make do with pretence. Exam paper leaks, hazardous air quality, bankrupt state electricity boards, bleeding PSUs, distressed farmers and cities drowning in an afternoon’s rain. A committee is appointed. It deliberates, submits a report, the government accepts what it must and the rest awaits the next crisis. The sequence repeats itself with the fidelity of a ritual. This is not the indictment of one government; the pattern predates the current one and will likely outlive it.
India’s peculiar approach to governance beckons the tag of ‘Republic of Committees’ amid persisting problems. Take the current government. By one working count, it has appointed at least 30 national commissions, committees, expert groups and task forces between 2014 and 2026 on deregulation, disinvestment, demography and simultaneous elections. Budget 2025 waxed eloquent on regulatory reform for Viksit Bharat. Two bodies followed: a high-level committee under Rajiv Gauba and a deregulation committee under Cabinet Secretary T V Somanathan.
Their submissions are not public, but some impact is visible. Guaba propelled the decriminalisation of laws and withdrawal of over 200 quality control orders. There is much lather about deregulation at the state level, but recommendations for it sit in a black box. There can be a test for it simpler than any report: do entrepreneurs wade past fewer than the earlier 100-plus clearances for a project? Has the regime moved from prohibited-unless-permitted to permitted-unless-prohibited approach? In May 2026, Gauba told industry the Centre would move there. Future tense.
British historian C Northcote Parkinson had said, “A committee is organic in nature, it takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom.” In India, the committee has become furniture: part of the fittings of governance, so familiar that nobody asks who ordered it, rearranged with every change of government and never carted out.
Has the perpetual parade of committees been nurtured by the existence of committee rooms or by an institutional incapacity to address what citizens face? A room that exists will be booked. The script of Yes, Minister supplied a politician’s logic: “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do it.” The 1980s’ quip from a fictional London resonates in 21st-century Delhi.
The ritual is older than the Republic. After the Great Famine of 1876-78, Richard Strachey’s commission of 1880 recommended a famine code; it arrived in 1883. That’s how the British Raj used commissions to postpone a reckoning. The Republic inherited the habit along with the filing cabinets.
The Pawar Committee on disaster management submitted recommendations in June 2003. Nine of the 10 had not been implemented when the tsunami struck in December 2004. In May 2005, this columnist counted over 50 committees set up by the UPA government. Six committees studied unemployment, four infrastructure.
Political intent needs parking space—ergo, committees. Whether or not their recommendations are implemented, the consequences are visible in the real world, in real time. In 2026, power distribution companies await a Rs 1-lakh-crore bailout, the third since 2004. A decade after the Smart Cities promise, urban India drowns every monsoon and gasps for clean air the rest of the year. Agitating school students reveal much about education, as does the absence of electricity in over 70,000 schools in a “fully electrified” India.
Committees illuminate the consequence, too. The Second Administrative Reforms Commission presented 15 reports. A Group of Ministers was appointed. No public ledger informs what got done. What didn’t get done? Administrative reforms.
The goal of doubling farmers’ income stalls because agriculture still runs on policy whimsies on pricing and export bans. The power sector loses, leaks and is robbed, and every fix is tripped by political pelf. The bankruptcy code cleaned the banks’ books, bad loans are low, but creditors recover 30 paise on the rupee. The Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act targets are missed year after year because the promise of discipline loses to elections.
It is not the diagnostic capacity of the Indian State that is in question, but the capacity for follow-through action. In the US, the Federal Advisory Committee Act opens advisory committees’ records to the public; the base realignment and closure commission ensures that recommendations cannot be shelved. A recommendation binds only when the design makes inaction the harder choice: publication by law, implementation by default.
The old maxim of Indian democracy is “98 parts sunwai (hearing), two parts karwai (action)”. The committee is how the 98 percent gets performed. Wilbur Cohen, the architect of US Social Security, held, “A cycle limits how much can be done at any one time and leaves the rest to the next generation.” In India, the election calendar decides it and committees supply the alibis. The fix is not more diagnosis. It is the rule of publishing the report and binding the response.
Someday, a government will appoint a committee to examine the long history of the Committee Raj. It will surely ask for an extension.
Read all columns by Shankkar Aiyar
Shankkar Aiyar
Author of The Gated Republic, Aadhaar: A Biometric History of India’s 12 Digit Revolution, and Accidental India
(shankkar.aiyar@gmail.com)
