There are four levels of government in India - national, state, district, and sub-district. It's my view that mainstream public commentary has very limited understanding of the last two levels. When we talk about weak state capacity, while it's a problem at all levels, it's most acutely felt at the lowest two levels. I'll call these below the iceberg levels.
Outsiders engaging with the government, including consultants and researchers working with government, see very little or hardly any of the parts below the state-level. Their exposure to districts, leave aside the block and villages, are confined to, at best, sanitised visits. There is only so much (or so little) that such visits can help. Those from the private sector, whose exposure is limited to reading newspapers/books and watching television which reinforce cliched and nuance-free (and very often misleading) perceptions, have even less understanding of what lies below the iceberg.
These workplaces are unbelievably different environments from what one encounters in the formal private sector. Officials have to manage with acutely scarce financial and physical resources, not to mention poor quality of manpower. They have to overcome challenging, often hostile, local environments with entrenched vested interests to get anything done. They are heavily over-burdened, cover vast (often inhospitable) geographical jurisdictions, and face unrealistic expectations from public and their superiors. Compounding these are some problems of the times - a media prone to sensationalisation and defamation, and the toxic virality of social media and WhatsApp based opinion formation.
The best management theories on managing time, people, and situations break down when you are faced with meetings, people, and events which/who are beyond your control. After you travel 100 km, you are lucky if the District Collector's or Project Director's meeting is actually held. Your immediate sub-ordinates are more likely to owe their allegiance to the local legislator. As to events, you can face anything from riots to floods to a disease outbreak to an industrial dispute to elephants running amok, all within a span of a week or less. There are also the endless series of events, where some program/scheme or other is launched or celebrated, leaving you with little time to "plan" and execute.
In any theory of the world that you are exposed to, if you give clear and written directions and provide all the logistics, it's inconceivable that some action is not done. It can be of poor quality, but the response happens. Not so in weak public systems. If you put in place an end-to-end work-flow automated software with single source of truth, it's difficult to believe that the purpose would not be met. But not so in these sub-state layers of the government (It's a different matter that even in the state layer, several things follow the same path of failure).
Outsiders talking about lateral entry and wanting to enter laterally generally only see the apparently glamorous world of policy making. They feel that it's an opportunity for them to contribute with their logically coherent but 36000 feet high opinions. Little do they realise that not only is this macro view sorely inadequate to formulate any meaningful policy, leave aside navigate the system (political, bureaucratic, oversight, and judicial) to get it approved. And I am not even talking about executing the policy, so that it does not remain a good oped or research paper.
In this context, I want to point out that taking any technically sound policy (formulated with the help of a consultant, experts etc), filtering it for political acceptability and bureaucratic execution feasibility, navigating the system to secure its approval, and managing the execution in challenging environments is also a specialisation. It's the hardly discussed but critical specialisation of the generalist bureaucrat. I would venture to argue that, apart from a few areas like macroeconomic and certain infrastructure policy making, this specialisation is more important to get meaningful things actually done in public systems much more than any form of technical specialisation. More on this in State Capability in India.
To conclude, for any lateral entry to be effective, it's required that they have at least some limited understanding of the context and how things happen below the iceberg. This cannot be understood in any meaningful manner except through some immersive experience. You have to put in the hard miles to become an effective public administrator. Further, in the vast majority of public policy space, the greatest value of lateral entry lies in entering below the iceberg and at the lower levels of the government. And even if the lateral entry is at the level of central and state governments (outside of a tiny space), it's essential to have had some immersive experience of below the iceberg. I have written about it here and also in State Capability in India.
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