The Everyday Republic: How the State Loses Its People

When the state makes everyday life more burdensome, it loses democratic legitimacy

A few years ago, my domestic help said to me “दिक्कत बहुत बढ़ गई है” while referring to some trouble she was having in accessing her ration. The statement stuck with me because it put in stark relief how someone like me would speak about living in a democracy - free speech, rule of law, free and fair elections - versus how ordinary Indians experience democracy in everyday living.

The poor in our country face visible hardship every day - workers having to return en masse to their villages in times of national crisis, the single one-hour slot between 5–6 AM I saw listed by a domestic worker on the society app, labour lined up like cattle at a mazdoor mandi.

My domestic help was speaking about water, transport, traffic, ration, school, hospital, police, paperwork, pollution, safety, prices, local officials, petty delays, arbitrary demands. Her understanding of the government is based on a series of encounters with the state - can I get my ration? Is my husband stopped by the policeman and slapped twice before being asked to cough up Rs 500? Is there a rule? Will it be followed? How many times do I have to go back?

Her understanding of democratic governance is visceral: does the state reduce the everyday burden on the citizen, or does it enlarge it? If the poor feel that life has become harder to manage - then that is a political fact of the first order.

Two Kinds of Friction

In India, life is hard for two reasons.

The first is the context of life itself in a large, poor, unequal, densely populated and only partially formalised democracy. Claims collide. Claimants outpace capacity. Friction is produced just by virtue of scale, diversity, scarcity, and interdependence. This is part and parcel of what it means to live in India and for all its jaggedness, it is in many ways what makes India so exceptional and inherently interesting. Streamlining this friction entirely would mean the loss of that teeming quality that makes India so vibrant. Nor can a democratic state abolish this complexity without veering into authoritarianism.

But then there’s another kind of friction - the friction which the state itself creates through multiplying rules, changes, non-application of mind, arbitrariness, corruption, callousness, and lack of professionalism. Diktats from the top without empathy for the resulting hardship or exclusion. Multiple visits to the local office for simple work. Unclear rules, inconsistent or selective application. The office is open but the official is absent. The process is digital but still requires informal mediation. Citizens becoming answerable to the state rather than the other way around.

This is not the friction of complexity. It is the friction of indifference, incompetence, and arbitrariness. Bad governance takes a messy world and makes it worse. It forces citizens to become amateur bureaucrats, fixers, negotiators, and detectives just to do ordinary things.

The teacher who does not show up, a banking process that makes no sense, having to make oneself legible to the state again and again - these things do not just waste time. They communicate contempt. Complexity can evoke patience, ingenuity, even admiration. Avoidable friction produces resentment because it feels like an insult.

India abounds in both. But it is the second kind - the avoidable, state-made friction - that is the deeper democratic injury. When citizens experience the state primarily as a source of friction rather than support, then the entire premise of democratic governance - that the state exists in service of its people - begins to unravel. Citizens do not merely lose patience. They lose faith in the system itself.

The Five Misalignments Of The Indian State

The academic shorthand for this friction is that India has “low state capacity.” But that framing obscures more than it elucidates. It treats capacity as a single quantity that a state either has or lacks - and flattens a set of distinct and interacting failures into one diagnosis. The problem of the Indian state is not one of low capacity but of misalignment - across authority, judgment, accountability, purpose, and resources. The following is not a catalogue of criticisms but an attempt to diagnose how specific, interacting failures inside the state produce the friction citizens experience outside it.

Misalignment of Authority: Over-Centralisation

The system is too centralised to respond to the inherent societal and contextual complexity. A district collector sits at the intersection of development, law and order, welfare delivery, revenue administration, local government oversight, elections, disaster management and so on. At any given time, a collector may be chairing dozens of committees responsible for district-level decision-making. This is in addition to the ongoing coordination, protocol, crisis management, political signalling, reporting, grievance redress and ceremonial overload. No individual, however capable, can be fully responsive across this entire spectrum.

Consequently, even though the Collector has a huge amount of discretion, the ability to use it judiciously across all levers is difficult. This is evident too in the fact that the Collectors who come into the limelight do so for exceptional performance in one narrow area, not overall improvement in the functioning of their district. This means that even where there is genuine initiative and desire to do good, it is necessarily expressed in a narrow sphere.

There is in theory a huge amount of supporting capacity. But in practice, below the DM, the chain thins out sharply. Capacity, authority, and confidence all fall away together. The lower administrative layers are not empowered enough, and local democratic bodies are not integrated enough, to carry the burden.

Misalignment of Judgement: For Compliance Not Outcomes

Where the state is close enough to understand lived reality or narrowly structured enough to use discretion judiciously, it has been systematically emptied of initiative and independent judgment. Given India’s population, even a district or block officer has a huge impact on the public. However, at these levels, accountability is defined by adherence to procedure rather than achievement of outcomes. As a result, officials optimize for compliance, not problem-solving and thus lack incentive to apply discretion by looking at the composite problem instead of their own silo.

There is also little incentive to be energetic since ultimate decision-making authority still vests at the top. In fact, the system is so weighed down by inertia that if a junior person were too active, they would either be shut down or get frustrated. Young officers quickly learn that energy brings risk, while caution brings career longevity and adapt accordingly.

This routinisation and non-application of mind does in even well-meaning government schemes. One such instance is the Government’s flagship skilling programme - PMKVY - which has repeatedly come under fire for poor placements ranging from 8% to 41% over four iterations spanning a decade. A recent CAG audit identified the problem squarely: training was initiated without ascertaining and aligning demand at the local level. Consequently, despite large amounts of money spent by the Government, youth are unable to find jobs even as the industry expresses dissatisfaction with the lack of skilled workers. There is a district skills committee designed to bridge exactly this gap, but this committee flounders precisely because the issue is too low in the Collector’s scheme of priorities while the district employment officer remains too junior and demotivated to take up the role.

Misalignment of Accountability: Upward Not Outward

In many instances, the state appears to lack empathy because the officer’s primary instinct is to satisfy the superior, not the citizen. Some time back, a state minister organised a tour for me of the skilling institutes. As I walked into a flagship institute, the head of the institute - who was a few minutes late, because we were on time - lurched forward to give me a small bouquet of flowers. At one point in the tour, a student came to introduce himself and was shooed away by the head. The man’s job was to showcase his students and how their capabilities were being honed, but he was more interested in plying me with tea and cashews in his office.

Citizens are the ostensible beneficiary of the system but the structure of the state itself has become oriented upward instead of outward to the public. Files move upward. Explanations move upward. Fear is applied downward. The superior appears as the real source of reward and punishment while the citizen appears in the system as a case, a petitioner, a number, a problem.

So even where public service exists in rhetoric, the lived discipline of the system teaches something else: manage your seniors, protect yourself, comply upward. This is why citizens often feel unseen. The state is facing above, not outward.

Some upward accountability is necessary. A state cannot run without hierarchy. The question is whether hierarchy is the only real form of accountability. In a healthy system, the officer should feel answerable upward for standards and outward for outcomes.

Misalignment of Resources: When The State Overwhelms Itself

Many parts of the frontline Indian state are overwhelmed. Many field officers genuinely feel besieged. Recent instances, including distress among electoral officers during intensive revisions, reflect this strain, but the pattern is widespread and routine. For instance, a single teacher in a multi-class school in a village, lacking any support system, may feel a sense of despair. When officials say they feel outclassed, it is not merely an excuse. It reflects a mismatch between what the system demands and what it equips them to do.

Overwork is one of the mechanisms through which avoidable friction gets produced. If a person is handling too many functions, too many files, too many beneficiaries, they will default to the safest, fastest, least cognitively demanding response. This can mean buck-passing, escalation, delay, or rigid rule-following. An exhausted administration will either become mechanical or arbitrary. Reducing this to individual callousness misses the structural problem.

Democratically, this matters because citizens do not experience the reasons. They experience the outcome. They see delay, indifference, confusion. They do not see the workload, the reporting burden, the lack of staff. Trust erodes - not because officials are callous, but because the system has made it structurally impossible for them to be anything else.

Misalignment of Purpose

Already at lower levels, government jobs are seen as a sinecure for life. With accountability oriented upwards, this has reshaped the ethos of public service itself. The systemic logic of centralisation, compliance and upward accountability has distorted the underlying orientation of administration.

Public office should orient its officers around the question: whom do I serve? But if the answer becomes my superior, my political patron, my own career, then service becomes servility. That hollows out public vocation. One is no longer a steward of the common good but a careerist in an administrative hierarchy.

Lack of public purpose is corrosive not just for the state but also depletes the individual worker. A depleted person cannot be attentive, patient, generous in judgment. Over time, they come to resent the very public they are meant to serve.

This is not just an institutional failure but a culture that flows from the top. Consider the persistence of VIP culture - cavalcades, cleared roads, the expectation of deference - long after the red beacon was formally abolished. The beacon was a symbol, but the instinct runs deeper: public office understood as entitlement rather than obligation. When that becomes the default orientation, purpose doesn’t just drift. It inverts - and public office becomes a resource to be captured rather than a trust to be discharged.

The Political Economy of Friction

State-created friction is not just an outcome of poor institutional design. Friction is also instrumental. It creates a lucrative market for “fixers” and political intermediaries who derive their power by their ability to navigate the state. The use of digital technology has increased efficiency in many ways, but has also created new forms of exclusion - citizens who cannot navigate the digital interface are pushed toward the same intermediaries the technology was meant to bypass.

Systemic opacity functions too as a social filter through which patronage can be extended and the marginalised excluded. There are thus powerful interests invested in the persistence of friction - which means that reform is not merely a design challenge but a political one.

At the same time, every inefficiency is not dysfunctional. Proceduralism can seem frustrating but also guards against unchecked arbitrariness. Some are genuinely a form of due process in a system where multiple stakeholders are pulling in opposing directions. The challenge is distinguishing friction that protects from one that merely obstructs.

These five misalignments now form a self-reinforcing cycle. Over-centralisation feeds upward accountability, which starves lower levels of initiative, which concentrates cognitive load at the top, which produces arbitrariness, which generates more friction, which erodes public trust, which produces more scrutiny, which further paralyses lower-level discretion. And the generalised mistrust this breeds means that instead of investing more in state capacity - and thus reducing the friction which comes from scarcity - we desire instead to prune the state further.

The consequence is a state that multiplies friction - because it lacks resources, but also because it lacks alignment between authority, judgment, accountability and a civic orientation toward the people it serves.

How Friction Undermines Democracy

In India, friction is not evenly distributed. The elite have myriad ways to bypass it - through language, money, contacts, technology. The poor encounter it more nakedly. Friction is thus structured inequality in the experience of citizenship itself. The elite harness the state, others navigate the state, and the hapless poor are too often ground down by it.

The consequences for liberal democracy are serious. When citizens repeatedly experience the state as capricious or incompetent, they become more open to strongman promises, shortcuts, and personalised forms of authority. If the institutions of everyday life - the ration office, the school, the police station - feel bewildering or hostile, then anti-institutional politics becomes not irrational but logical. A functioning state visibly and tangibly reduces the burden on ordinary life is foundational to democratic legitimacy.

However, just as “low state capacity” means nothing unless disaggregated into its parts, the invocation to “build state capacity” has no meaning unless concretised into specific reforms. One common starting point in state reform discussions is decentralisation. But expanding discretion downward without concomitant changes to accountability, standards, and institutional culture could simply reproduce the same pathologies at more levels. Another approach, particularly in liberal politics, has been to increase procedural scrutiny, particularly from the outside. However, excessive scrutiny and the assumption of bad faith, can be as debilitating for state functioning as a culture of impunity can. When discretion disappears, the administration becomes mindless. But discretion is impossible in an environment of pervasive distrust. The Indian state already suffers from mindlessness at many levels. The cure for arbitrariness should not create a different kind of paralysis. Consequently, any serious approach must necessarily bring together a set of mutually reinforcing reforms.

Democracy is not tested only at the ballot box. It is tested in the queue. A democracy that cannot deliver a basic civic floor - functional schools, predictable processes, officials who see citizens rather than cases - is a democracy that is losing the argument for its own existence. The five misalignments described here are not abstract institutional failures. They are the mechanisms through which millions of citizens become alienated from the state.

What that civic floor would look like, and what it would take to build it, is the subject of Part II.

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