Courtesy: Bachelors in Arts in Public Administration

HISTORY

India in the 600 BCE

Such neat and prosperous civilisations as Harappa and Mohenjo-daaro must have had a disciplined, benevolent and uncorrupt cadre of public servants. In support of this, there are many references to Brihaspati’s works on laws and governance. An interesting extract from Aaine-Akbari [vol.III, tr. by H. S. Barrett, pp217–218] written by Abul Fazl, the famous historian of Akbar’s court, mentions a symposium of philosophers of all faiths held in 1578 at Akbar’s instance. This sounds credible in the context of Akbar’s restless desire to find truth, reflected in his launching a new religion called Din-e-elaahi. The account under advisement is given by the well-known historian Vincent Smith, in his article titled “The Jain Teachers of Akbar”. Some Charvaka thinkers are said to have participated in the symposium. Under the heading “Naastika” Abul Fazl has referred to the good work, judicious administration and welfare schemes that were emphasised by the Charvaka law-makers. Somadeva has also mentioned the Charvaka method of defeating the enemies of the nation. He has referred to thirteen enemies who remain disguised in the kingdom for their selfish interests. They may contain a few relatives of the king and subsidiary rulers, but they should not be spared. They should be rigorously punished like any other such opponent. Kautilya, as already mentioned, has given a detailed scheme to remove the enemies in the garb of friends. The Charvaka stalwart, Brihaspati, is so much more ancient than Kautilya and Somadeva. He appears to be contemporaneous with the Harappa and Mohenjo-daaro culture.# ISO certification in India

The central point of traditional religious ritual is to earn ready money for its perpetrators. All unproductive, barren rites designed for various moments in human life starting from several months prior to birth and extending over several years beyond death in the form of the annual sraddha, many of which are current even today, are but channels to feed the priests. They are unreal, imagined and wasteful. While they are unreal, imagined and wasteful; the feeding is real.

This cunning paradox was realised by the Charvaka for its real worth. They wanted financial causes to produce financial results. Imagined causes only produced imagined results not real ones.# ISO certification in India

Antiquity to the 19th century

Dating back to Antiquity, Pharaohs, kings and emperors have required pages, treasurers, and tax collectors to administer the practical business of government. Prior to the 19th century, staffing of most public administrations was rife with nepotism, favouritism, and political patronage, which was often referred to as a “spoils system”. Public administrators have long been the “eyes and ears” of rulers. In medieval times, the abilities to read and write, add and subtract were as dominated by the educated elite as public employment. Consequently, the need for expert civil servants whose ability to read and write formed the basis for developing expertise in such necessary activities as legal record-keeping, paying and feeding armies and levying taxes. As the European Imperialist age progressed and the militarily powers extended their hold over other continents and people, the need for a sophisticated public administration grew.

The field of management may well be said to have originated in ancient China, including possibly the first highly centralized bureaucratic state, and the earliest (by the second century BC) example of an administration based on merit through testing. Far in advance of the rest of the world until almost the end of the 18th century, Sinologist Herrlee G. Creel and other scholars find the influence of Chinese administration in Europe by the 12th century, for example, in Fredrick II’s promulgations, characterized as the “birth certificate of modern bureaucracy”. Thomas Taylor Meadows, Britain’s consul in Guangzhou, argued in his Desultory Notes on the Government and People of China (1847) that “the long duration of the Chinese empire is solely and altogether owing to the good government which consists in the advancement of men of talent and merit only,” and that the British must reform their civil service by making the institution meritocratic. Influenced by the ancient Chinese imperial examination, the Northcote–Trevelyan Report of 1854 recommended that recruitment should be on the basis of merit determined through competitive examination, candidates should have a solid general education to enable inter-departmental transfers, and promotion should be through achievement rather than “preferment, patronage, or purchase”. This led to implementation of Her Majesty’s Civil Service as a systematic, meritocratic civil service bureaucracy. Like the British, the development of French bureaucracy was influenced by the Chinese system. Voltaire claimed that the Chinese had “perfected moral science” and François Quesnay advocated an economic and political system modeled after that of the Chinese. French civil service examinations adopted in the late 19th century were also heavily based on general cultural studies. These features have been likened to the earlier Chinese model.# ISO certification in India

Though Chinese administration cannot be traced to any one individual, emphasizing a merit system figures of the Fa-Jia like 4th century BC reformer Shen Buhai (400–337 BC) may have had more influence than any other, and might be considered its founder, if not valuable as a rare pre-modern example of abstract theory of administration. Creel writes that, in Shen Buhai, there are the “seeds of the civil service examination”, and that, if one wishes to exaggerate, it would “no doubt be possible to translate Shen Buhai’s term Shu, or technique, as ‘science'”, and argue that he was the first political scientist, though Creel does “not care to go this far”.

The eighteenth-century noble, King Frederick William I of Prussia, created professorates in Cameralism in an effort to train a new class of public administrators. The universities of Frankfurt an der Oder and University of Halle were Prussian institutions emphasizing economic and social disciplines, with the goal of societal reform. Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi was the most well-known professor of Cameralism. Thus, from a Western European perspective, Classic, Medieval, and Enlightenment-era scholars formed the foundation of the discipline that has come to be called public administration.# ISO certification in India

Lorenz von Stein, an 1855 German professor from Vienna, is considered the founder of the science of public administration in many parts of the world. In the time of Von Stein, public administration was considered a form of administrative law, but Von Stein believed this concept too restrictive. Von Stein taught that public administration relies on many preestablished disciplines such as sociology, political science, administrative law and public finance. He called public administration an integrating science, and stated that public administrators should be concerned with both theory and practice. He argued that public administration is a science because knowledge is generated and evaluated according to the scientific method.# ISO certification in India

Modern American public administration is an extension of democratic governance, justified by classic and liberal philosophers of the western world ranging from Aristotle to John Locke to Thomas Jefferson.# ISO certification in India