The size of the Nepali bureaucracy is not gigantic by sober South Asian standards. However, unlike many nations in South Asia like India and Pakistan, it is a unified and centrally specified organisation recruited in and deployed from the centre. The state authority in Nepal has remained absolute, centralised and undivided.

The bureaucracy never functioned as an impartial and effective mediating agency responsible for serving the people as functionary of public service.

It was made to serve as an instrument to rule and impose the will of the ruling oligarchs upon the people. Even today the bureaucratic culture and mindset do not seem to have changed much.

The personalised organisation culture inherited from the past has served as a barrier to rational decision-making in the Nepali bureaucracy.

However, bureaucracy as an organisation should not be blamed for this fully. The country’s polity and political leadership can be held responsible for the lukewarm and below average performance of the bureaucracy. The patrimonial orientation of the political leadership has always tended to coerce the bureaucracy into submission.

The fragility of the Nepali state is an outcome of the weak civil administration of the country. The civil bureaucracy is disoriented and divided today. It has not been able to rise to the occasion and respond to the citizens in a civil and efficient manner consistent with the new challenges.

Moreover, in a country like ours where the state reserves the duty-bearing role and is responsible to deliver both core and peripheral services to the people, the civil bureaucracy is responsible for representing the state and delivering services to the people.

Needless to say, the bureaucratic apparatus is designed at the centre to suit the demands and nature of the centralized state system. The Nepali bureaucracy is therefore top heavy. The central organizations of the state are overcrowded and overstaffed.

But lower echelons are understaffed and the reach of the state has been weak, scattered and ineffective at the bottom layers. The most critical question often raised is the flawed mode and manner of deployment of staff for basic service delivery for the people.

The government has formulated manuals and guidelines, for instance, to lay down the process and procedure for delivery of basic health services defined by the state. But the provisions in the guidelines and manuals are neither understood properly at the grassroots level nor are the state agencies, in most cases, adequately staffed to undertake the tasks effectively.

It is disputed that the executive authorities at the centre meddle in the transfer and deployment of the staff at the grassroots. Those who have access to power wielders can afford to flout the rules.

Moreover, the central authorities are not properly informed of the situation at the faroff villages nor are they able to monitor the extent and quality of services being delivered in the rural backwaters.

Unless the centralised and patrimonial character of the Nepali bureaucracy is reoriented and reorganised the premise of effective service delivery will remain elusive.

Rijal is member of the Administrative Restructuring Commission