India needs a dose of Musk's DOGE

In Punjab, a minister was put in charge of the administrative reforms ministry. He was given the ministry in 2023, after a reshuffle in the AAP-led government. His run in this ministry continued past another reshuffle in 2024. It was only in in February 2025 that a government notification revealed that the ministry “…is not in existence as on date”. Which, in non-bureaucratic language means that Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal was minister of a ministry that never existed. It is not yet public how many government employees worked in this ministry that never existed. This is just one recent example of the sarkari profligacy and the bloated babudom that the public has to deal with as well as pay for.

The matter of accountability is in the same category of what Mahatma Gandhi is thought to have said when he was asked about his opinion on ‘western civilisation’. “I think it would be a good idea,” Bapu is believed to have said. It well might be an apocryphal story, but it falls in the same category as babus and accounting for their work.

In the US, where Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE is creating new rules and smashing old norms by the day, government employees are now being asked to respond by email to list out their work over the week. There is a straight up threat: reply or resign. While it has riled up the Trump administration from within and also unions as too harsh and unneeded, the intent is clear. Government employees need to be accountable.

Does India also need a harsh wake-up call for its bureaucracy? We also have something very close to DOGE by way of abbreviations: Department of Expenditure (DoE) and Directorate General of Employment (DGE). But the word salad of departments and directorates doesn’t work on efficiencies, it is more about data and numbers. And this is what the numbers say about employees in the central government.

These are the numbers only for Central government. In addition to these are close to 65 million pensioners, including from the armed forces, as of 31st March 2024. Then there are close to 1 million vacancies in the centre as of March 2023. After this come the state governments. Estimates show that the latest number is around 14 million across the country.

There’s more. Take a look at the rising cost of keeping the engines of government and bureaucracy running.

All this adds up to a story that’s been doing the rounds for the years: babudom is too bloated. All budgets talk about cutting the cost of government. This current government’s catchy slogan was ‘more governance, less government’. But the data doesn’t point toward that. If anything, the Indian public is facing a double whammy: as private jobs dry up, thousands and thousands of applicants turn up for the handful government jobs that are advertised at the same time when there is growing frustration with the services provided by the authorities to taxpayers. Just a few days ago, a Rs 14,000 crore road in Mumbai that was inaugurated a year or so ago and was touted as a huge sign of vikas went viral because of huge potholes. It was social media that eventually prompted the PMO to get involved and the road was fixed, but unsatisfactorily. In December 2024, an ex-transport department employee was found with Rs 10 crore in cash and 52 kg of gold. An IAS officer who was jailed on allegations of swindling crores from MNREGA was given her job back after she got bail. Another IAS was accused of faking disability to get into the service on a quota.

These are all examples that are reported. Every single day, the aam janta of this country is facing corruption and massively lethargic, inefficient services, with very little consequences faced by those entrusted to provide these services with alacrity and efficiency.

Which is why the question must be asked and answered: Does India need a dose of DOGE?

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