(a) Policy problems are increasingly tending towards being wicked. Discuss the capacity and preparedness of the State to tackle…

(a) Wicked problems and State capacity

Rittel and Webber ("Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning", 1973) described wicked problems through ten characteristics: contested definitions, open-ended boundaries and solutions that create new problems. In India they appear as climate vulnerability, chaotic urbanisation and public-health shocks such as COVID-19. Capacity shows in statutory and strategic frameworks: the Disaster Management Act, 2005, the National Action Plan on Climate Change (2008) and NITI Aayog's SDG localisation frameworks that benchmark sub-national performance. Practical successes include Odisha's near-zero-casualty cyclone evacuations (Phailin 2013, Fani 2019) and CoWIN's coordination of over two billion vaccine doses. Preparedness, however, is limited by silos: horizontal coordination across fragmented ministries is weak, vertical coordination among the Centre, States and local bodies suffers from unequal fiscal and technical capacity, and generalist services have limited epistemic competence for data-driven forecasting and adaptive governance. The apparatus therefore tends to meet non-linear problems with linear, departmental interventions. Keith Grint distinguishes tame, wicked and critical problems and argues that wicked ones need collaborative leadership that asks the right questions and builds coalitions, not command solutions. The State is thus partly prepared for discrete shocks but poorly equipped for problems that cut across levels and sectors.

(b) The paradox of zero-based budgeting

Pyhrr developed ZBB at Texas Instruments around 1970; Carter used it in Georgia, and the US federal government adopted it in 1977 and dropped it in 1981. It aimed to break the incrementalism described by Wildavsky (The Politics of the Budgetary Process, 1964), where budgets grow by small increments over a base that is rarely questioned, by requiring every programme to be justified afresh through decision packages. In practice it became highly incremental. The cognitive burden, paperwork and time limits overwhelmed departments; information asymmetry between line departments and finance led to superficial reviews and ritual compliance; and the political cost of defunding established programmes and interest groups made comprehensive reappraisal impossible. In India, after a trial in the Department of Science and Technology (1983), the Finance Ministry extended ZBB to all ministries from 1986-87, but administrative inertia and calculation overload led to its quiet abandonment, echoing the PPBS (US federal government, 1965-71). Budgeting then moved to Outcome Budgeting (2005) and the current performance-cum-outcome framework, recognising that bounded rationality favours targeted marginal reviews over recurrent zero-base overhauls.

(c) ICT, governance and citizen empowerment

ICT transforms governance through platforms under Digital India: UMANG for unified service delivery, the e-Courts mission mode project for judicial pendency and GIS-based PM GatiShakti for coordinated infrastructure planning, all of which streamline processes and reduce discretion. It empowers citizens: CPGRAMS strengthens grievance accountability, MyGov crowdsources policy inputs, RTI Online enforces transparency, and DBT through the JAM trinity has cut out rent-seeking intermediaries. ICT is not unalloyed, though. A digital divide by gender, income and geography persists, with slow BharatNet connectivity in rural and tribal areas. Authentication failures and biometric errors cause exclusion in welfare delivery; in the PDS, failures after mandatory Aadhaar seeding were linked to denial of rations. India had no general data protection law until the DPDP Act, 2023, which itself is criticised for broad government exemptions, so surveillance and privacy concerns persist. ICT's potential is thus real but conditional on inclusion, safeguards and last-mile capacity.