Wisdom lies in knowing what to reckon with and what to overlook. An officer being engrossed with the periphery, ignoring the core issues before him, is not rare in the bureaucracy. Do you agree that such preoccupation of an administrator leads to travesty of justice to the cause of effective service delivery and good governance? Critically evaluate.

i) Honesty means following red tape and red tape means inefficiency

ii) Honesty means more about following rules and rules lead to time delays. This affects efficiency. These merits however ignore that corruption and efficiency are meaningless for public service. Also, efficiency and honesty can be managed by use of technology, e-governance and also by good policy-making and well-articulated rules and legislations.

b) Democratic ethos stand for equality of ideas while bureaucratic ethos stand for hierarchy and appropriate following of orders. Essentially democratic ethos are not followed to the point in a bureaucratic setup. But this can be corrected by taking the following steps: i) By allowing lower officials ability to share ideas with seniors.

ii) By allowing consensus-based decision-making at official levels to maximise democratic ethos.

c) Committed bureaucracy stands for bureaucrats being committed to serve their political bosses while neutrality stands for being apolitical in one's conduct. There is a perception that committed bureaucracy is not able to maintain neutrality.

The solution to this is:

i) Bureaucracy is committed to their political bosses but are guided by laws of the land and the constitution.

ii) Neutrality in application of the constitution and the laws of the land is to be followed irrespective of the political ideology in power.