From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

crème de la crème
of all India.
An Indian had to be outstanding to be admitted into this elite British service.
During one of my visits in the 1960s I stayed at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Before
golf one morning, two Indian officers who had been members of the original
ICS, not the IAS (Indian Administrative Service) which it had since become,
came for breakfast. They were impressive. One of them explained how a few
hundred ICS officers governed 450 million Indians in British India and governed
well. He spoke with nostalgia of the quality of the men selected for the ICS, and
regretted that the entrance examinations, which used to be conducted only in
English, could now be taken in English or in Hindi. Populist pressures had
lowered standards of recruitment and had also led to poorer communications
within the service.
It was a gradual slide in quality of a once elite service, now caught up in the
throes of a social and economic revolution which had reduced living standards.
During the days of the British Raj they had lived up to a certain lifestyle.
Generals, admirals, air marshals and senior ICS officials played golf. In the India
of the 1960s and ’70s, they could not buy good (i.e., imported) golf balls because
their import was forbidden. I remember one excursion to the Delhi Golf Club.
Our high commission had advised me to bring several boxes of golf balls to
distribute to the committee members of the club. It was depressing to see top
brass and civil servants breaking up the packages and taking fistfuls of golf balls
to stuff into their golf bags.
Indeed, golf balls were so precious that caddies would dash into any house or
rough to find them. Once, at the former Bombay Royal Golf Course in 1965, I
sliced my ball into a squatter area and heard the loud clatter as it fell on a zinc
roof. My caddie dashed off, I thought to find out who was hurt. But no – a little
boy emerged with the golf ball, not to complain of injury but to bargain over the
price of the ball. I was sad to see how the caddies had collected broken plastic
and wooden tees, sharpened their ends and re-used them to tee up the balls of the

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players. In the locker rooms, bearers (menservants) put on and took off your
socks and shoes. There were too many hands with too little work.
Perhaps the fault lies in the system. India has wasted decades in state
planning and controls that have bogged it down in bureaucracy and corruption.
A decentralised system would have allowed more centres like Bangalore and
Bombay to grow and prosper. Another reason could be their caste system. It has
been the enemy of meritocracy – each caste demands its quota in all institutions,
whether recruitment into the IAS or entrance to the universities. A third reason is
the endless conflicts and wars with Pakistan that make both poorer.
The Delhi I visited in the 1960s was a big, sprawling city with many open
spaces, not polluted and without too many squatters. The Delhi of the 1990s was
an environmental mess. It was January and the air smelt foul with the fumes
from coal burning in power stations and in homes. There were squatters
everywhere. For security they placed a whole company of soldiers in front of the
Sheraton Hotel where I stayed. And traffic was clogged up. It was not the
spacious capital it once was.
By the time Narasimha Rao’s Congress Party lost the election in 1996, a 13-