First Administrative Reforms Commission (Morarji Desai)

The First Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC) was constituted by a Government of India resolution dated 5 January 1966, issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs during the brief premiership of Lal Bahadur Shastri and operationalised under Indira Gandhi. It was established as a non-statutory advisory body, not under any specific Act of Parliament, drawing instead on the executive's plenary power to inquire into the machinery of government. The Commission was charged with examining the public administration of the country and making recommendations for reform and reorganisation wherever necessary. Its creation responded to two decades of accumulated post-Independence pressures: an administrative apparatus inherited from the colonial Indian Civil Service tradition, the expanding remit of a planned economy under successive Five-Year Plans, and growing public concern over corruption, delay, and the gap between citizen and state.

Morarji Desai was named the founding chairman of the Commission. When Desai joined Indira Gandhi's Cabinet as Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister in March 1967, he relinquished the chairmanship, and K. Hanumanthaiah, the former Chief Minister of Mysore, succeeded him. The Commission's working method was to refer discrete subjects to specialist study teams and working groups composed of serving officers, retired administrators, and subject experts; these teams produced detailed studies that the Commission distilled into reports submitted seriatim to the government rather than as a single consolidated document. Between 1966 and 1970 the Commission produced twenty reports, and across them it issued a body of recommendations conventionally numbered at 537. Each report was tabled and considered by the relevant ministry, which retained full discretion over acceptance, modification, or rejection.

The twenty reports covered a deliberately wide canvas. Among the most consequential were the report on Problems of Redressal of Citizens' Grievances (1966), which recommended the institution of the Lokpal at the centre and Lokayuktas in the states; the report on Machinery for Planning; the report on Personnel Administration; the report on Centre–State Relationships; the report on Finance, Accounts and Audit; the report on Economic Administration; the report on the Machinery of the Government of India and its Procedures of Work; and the report on State Administration. The personnel recommendations pressed for a unified grading structure, professionalisation of the civil services, and a clearer separation between policy formulation and execution. The grievance-redress report drew explicitly on the Scandinavian Ombudsman model, proposing a two-tier institution in which the Lokpal would handle complaints against ministers and secretaries and the Lokayukta would address grievances against lower officials.

The Commission's most enduring contemporary legacy is the Lokpal–Lokayukta framework. Although the recommendation dates to 1966, repeated Lokpal Bills failed in Parliament across decades until the Anna Hazare-led India Against Corruption movement of 2011 forced legislative action, culminating in the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013, and the appointment of Justice Pinaki Chandra Ghose as the first Lokpal of India in March 2019. Several states had moved earlier: Maharashtra established a Lokayukta in 1971, the first state to do so. Other accepted recommendations shaped institutions such as the Department of Personnel (created in 1970 and later elevated to the Department of Personnel and Training), and influenced the staffing pattern of central secretariat work and the planning machinery housed under the erstwhile Planning Commission in New Delhi.

The First ARC must be distinguished from the Second Administrative Reforms Commission, constituted in August 2005 under the chairmanship of Veerappa Moily (later M. Veerappa Moily's successor), which produced fifteen reports between 2005 and 2009 on subjects ranging from Right to Information to disaster management and ethics in governance. It should also be distinguished from earlier inquiries such as the A.D. Gorwala Report (1951) and the Paul H. Appleby Reports (1953 and 1956), which were narrower diagnostic exercises rather than a standing commission. Unlike a statutory commission of inquiry under the Commissions of Inquiry Act, 1952, the ARC possessed no coercive or judicial powers; its authority was purely persuasive, and its recommendations bound no one.

Controversy and critique attended the Commission's work and its aftermath. Critics noted that the government accepted only a portion of the 537 recommendations and implemented fewer still, leaving signature proposals — most prominently the Lokpal — dormant for nearly half a century. The Commission's incrementalist stance toward the steel-frame ICS-derived services drew criticism from those who sought more radical restructuring of the generalist–specialist divide. Scholars have also observed that the reports preceded the constitutional turbulence of the Emergency (1975–77), during which administrative neutrality came under acute strain, illustrating that structural recommendations cannot substitute for political will. Nonetheless, the conceptual vocabulary the ARC introduced — grievance redress, citizen-centric administration, accountability mechanisms — anchored subsequent reform discourse.

For the working practitioner, the First ARC remains a foundational reference. For UPSC Civil Services aspirants, it is a recurring General Studies Paper II topic on governance, accountability, and the evolution of anti-corruption institutions, frequently paired with the Lokpal Act and the Second ARC in comparative questions. For policy researchers and desk officers, the reports furnish the documented origin of institutions still operating today and a baseline against which to measure the persistent implementation deficit in Indian administrative reform. Understanding the First ARC is therefore indispensable to tracing how India's governance architecture acquired its present shape and where its long-standing reform debates began.