♤ Overlap between policy making and

implementation: This creates a tendency to focus on operational convenience rather than on public needs. In India, policy making is done at director and above level.

But the most important level i.e. crucial for consideration of cross-cutting impacts is that of the Secretaries. Also officers are more comfortable with implementation matters than with policy making. This results in sub-optimal policies, where adequate attention has not been paid to citizen needs.

♤ Over-centralization: In India, there is excessive concentration of implementation powers at the higher levels of the Ministries.

♤ Lack of non-governmental inputs and informed debates: The best expertise in many sectors lies outside the Government. Yet the policy processes and structures of Government have no systematic means for obtaining outside inputs.

♤ Lack of systematic analysis and integration prior to policy making: Policy decisions are often made without adequate analysis of costs, benefits, trade-offs and consequences. There is a school of thought which suggests that the excessive involvement of poorly informed generalists is the main cause of poor policy-making and implementation.

♤ Lack of evidence based research: Most of the times, policy formulation is carried out by few senior bureaucrats and politicians who are not aware of prevailing ground realities. There is no prior field study or survey is done to take macro as well as micro view of ground realities.

♤ Politically motivated policies: At times, electoral considerations dominate the aims and objectives of a policy. Frequent loan waiver by different states in India is one such example.

Loan waiver is poor economic policy. It creates moral hazard for the farmers and puts banking sector under stress.

♤ Lack of imagination: Public policy-making in India has frequently been characterized by a failure to anticipate needs, impacts, or reactions which could have reasonably been foreseen, thus impeding economic development. Policies have been reversed or changed more frequently than warranted by exogenous changes or new information.