Visitors to a heritage monument do not see the Tourism Department, the Public Works Department, the municipal corporation, the police, the Archaeological Survey of India, etc.; they experience a destination. For them, the question is simple: is it clean, accessible, safe, interesting, and worth recommending?
The government sees the same place very differently. For the government, responsibilities are divided into departmental silos. Tourist management is with the Tourism Department; roads are with PWD; water and sanitation are with the local Municipal Corporation; and monument management may be with the Archaeological Survey of India. Multiple agencies operate across all three tiers of government. Each agency may do its own job properly. Still, no one is fully accountable for the visitor’s experience.
The same pattern extends far beyond tourism. It is not unusual for investors to traverse 25 or more departments during their journey from initial enquiry through land acquisition, approvals, and utilities to the commencement of commercial operations. People also judge healthcare, education, and infrastructure by the outcomes they experience. However, the government is organised vertically, with departments that have separate jurisdictions, budgets, cadres, and lines of accountability.
In other words, the citizen’s journey is horizontal, whereas the state operates vertically.
However, the structure is not always a problem. Silos can protect public value. Specialist departments preserve expertise. Independent regulators safeguard professional judgement. Finance departments must be able to question spending ministries. Environmental oversight must be independent, and auditors and regulators cannot be subsumed within executive outcome targets. All of this serves legitimate statutory and governance objectives.
The difficulty arises when every part works, yet the whole still fails. The problem stems from a lack of convergence among the agencies' goals to deliver the best possible experience for the citizen.
Almost as a matter of routine, we come across a road finished yesterday, only to find it dug up today for sewerage work. A monument may have been restored while the surrounding area continues to fall behind in infrastructure. A tourism campaign may begin before the last mile is ready. An investor may have secured all approvals on time yet still be unable to start because the approvals were never aligned with his actual path.
Beyond coordination
India’s answer to this conundrum is the usual one: coordination. It creates committees of secretaries, empowered groups, convergence mandates, and single-window portals. These measures can help when the problem is mainly about information or crisis management. Departments may be willing to cooperate but lack shared data, common timelines, or a clear way to escalate problems. However, these coordinated efforts start to unravel if they require sustained action across agencies over time. Then institutional priorities reassert themselves, and the system soon reverts to ‘Business as usual’. The difficulty arises when the problem is no longer one of information but of authority.
They work less well when the real issue is authority.
An officer on an interdepartmental committee still reports to a parent department for career progression, budget priorities, and day-to-day instructions. The officer may cooperate fully. However, if the departments have different priorities, a committee cannot override those incentives or shift authority by goodwill alone.
So the question is not whether coordination sounds good. It is whether coordination is enough. If the problem is information, better coordination may suffice. If the problem is a conflict of authority, the structure itself may need to change.
Designing outcomes
Invest Punjab is a useful example. The underlying governance problem was straightforward: an investor setting up a business in Punjab had to deal with multiple departments, each with its own process and timeline, and there was no single point of contact responsible for the entire journey.
The response was not just another portal. Processes were reengineered around a single accountable interface, covering everything from first contact through land acquisition, clearances, utility connections, and post-investment support. Clearances from more than 23 departments and services were brought into that framework, with authority delegated to that one office. The focus shifted from ‘making’ the investor comply with Government regulations to ‘facilitating’ his compliance.
The success lay not in creating a portal, but in redesigning a transparent, accountable system around the investor’s journey. The mantra was a single accountable authority with delegated empowerment to deliver. The system has worked well for more than a decade now and lived up to its promise.
Even then, investment facilitation remains one of the easier cases. The goal is clear, the user is clear, and political support can be strong. Tourism is harder. So are healthcare, urban governance, and life sciences. In these areas, outcomes are mixed, responsibilities overlap, and some institutions must remain independent.
Rethinking governance architecture
This is where the budget problem becomes unavoidable. Government budgets are appropriated vertically, department by department. This has sound constitutional basis: legislatures authorise expenditure, ministers are accountable for their departments, and auditors can examine whether money was spent lawfully.
Yet outcomes are produced horizontally.
Who, then, should control the resources required for a composite outcome? An integrated authority with no influence over relevant budgets may be little more than a coordinator. An authority controlling every relevant budget risks becoming a parallel government. Between these extremes lie possible arrangements — integrated planning envelopes, ring-fenced allocations, shared outcome targets or priority-setting authority — but each raises questions about legislative accountability and audit.
The same architectural challenge arises in economic reform. India’s reform debate has traditionally focused on two questions: is the policy analytically sound, and does the government have the political will to pursue it? A third question deserves equal attention: what implementation architecture does this particular reform require?
Different reforms require different designs. Some can spread through common infrastructure and interoperability standards. Others, like the GST, require ongoing negotiation between the Union and the States. Some depend on political sponsorship strong enough to overcome departmental resistance. Others create concentrated losers whose capacity to block change is far greater than that of the dispersed beneficiaries who may gain over time.
Silos should not be treated as a problem in themselves. In many cases, they preserve expertise, independence, and accountability; the real task is to retain them where they are useful and to break them down where they block outcomes.
We would like to propose a broader design principle rather than a single institutional solution. At the cutting edge, governance structures across India feature a horizontal layer comprising the District Collector, District Magistrate, or Deputy Commissioner. Almost every major department operating in the state has a district-level presence. However, they continue to report vertically to their parent departments, and the Collector’s coordinating authority rests as much on convention and personal leadership as on clearly defined statutory authority over these departments. Yet the citizen’s journey remains horizontal. Hence, whether it is a hospital campus, a monument, or an investment journey spanning months and multiple approvals, there should be an empowered authority with both the mandate and the means at the point of delivery, accountable for the citizen’s overall experience rather than merely for the performance of individual departments. The ‘whole of government view’ needs to be taken at all levels, particularly at the point of delivery. Someone must own the outcome of the citizen’s experience.
The starting point should be the outcome, not the organogram.
If a government were designing a tourism system, an investment journey, or an urban service from scratch, what would the citizen, visitor or investor need from beginning to end? Which functions genuinely require independence? Where is coordination sufficient? Where do conflicting decision-making rights need to be reconciled? Who controls the relevant budgets? And who is accountable when every department meets its target but the overall outcome still fails?
Governance structures are not the destination; they are vehicles. They are created for the Citizen, and Citizens do not experience government department by department. If Citizens experience government horizontally, governance structures must increasingly reflect that reality. The State’s governance architecture should align with that simple fact!
(Karan A Singh and Anirudh Tewari are former Chief Secretaries, Punjab. Utkarsh Palnitkar is an independent Consultant)
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.
