“Critically examine the role of formal and informal structures of bureaucracy in economic and social reconstruction of the developing societies.” (1995)
Post-colonial states made bureaucracy the main agent of planned change, the “development administration” that would build infrastructure, reform land relations and deliver welfare. Whether it could do so depended less on its formal blueprint, derived from Max Weber’s ideal type, than on how that blueprint interacted with the informal structures inside and around it.
Formal structure: the case for it
- Rules, hierarchy, merit recruitment and impersonality give continuity across regimes, curb patronage and make large programmes possible. India’s all-India services, the Planning Commission and district administration ran the Green Revolution, elections and famine prevention.
- S. N. Eisenstadt (“Bureaucracy, Bureaucratization, and Debureaucratization”, 1959) argued that in new states bureaucracy often becomes the central modernising elite, mobilising resources where markets and parties are weak.
- Recent digital formalisation extends this. Government figures credit Direct Benefit Transfer with ₹3.48 lakh crore saved on leakages between 2009 and 2024. PM-KISAN alone removed about 2.1 crore ineligible beneficiaries.
Informal structure: the hidden half
- The Hawthorne studies at Western Electric, interpreted by Elton Mayo, and Peter M. Blau (The Dynamics of Bureaucracy, 1955) showed that informal groups, consultation among peers and bent rules can raise efficiency, not just subvert it.
- Michael Lipsky (Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1980) showed that policy is actually made by frontline workers exercising discretion. In India these are the patwari, the anganwadi worker and the block officer. Their local knowledge can adapt rigid schemes to real needs. Yet Lipsky also warned that overloaded frontline staff ration services and routinise clients, so discretion can deepen inequality as easily as reduce it.
- Informal ties with communities build trust. Social audits of rural employment works, first institutionalised by the Andhra Pradesh government, joined official records to village scrutiny.
Critical assessment: why transplanted structures misfire
- Fred W. Riggs (Administration in Developing Countries: The Theory of Prismatic Society, 1964) described developing societies as “prismatic”, midway between fused and differentiated. There the office (sala) shows formalism: a wide gap between prescribed rules and actual conduct. Kinship, caste and patronage (“clects”) and poly-normativism leave the formal structure a facade.
- Gunnar Myrdal (Asian Drama, 1968) called such states “soft states”, unwilling to enforce their own laws.
- Informal structure turns dysfunctional when it becomes corruption, caste networks and political capture. The early-1970s demand for a “committed bureaucracy” loyal to the ruling party’s programme threatened Weberian neutrality and invited politicised transfers.
- Formal excess is also a problem. Colonial rule-bound procedure produced red tape, and digital systems can exclude those whose biometric authentication fails.
- Recognising that rules alone do not change behaviour, Mission Karmayogi (approved 2020) shifts training from rules to roles. By July 2025 over 1.26 crore users, central and state, had registered on its iGOT learning platform.
Conclusion
Neither structure reconstructs society alone. Formal structure gives legitimacy, scale and accountability, while informal structure gives adaptability and local embeddedness. Developing societies succeed where the two are aligned through transparency, citizen oversight and a professional ethic. Where informal loyalties hollow out formal rules, Riggs’s prismatic “formalism” wins.