Second Administrative Reforms Commission (Veerappa Moily)

The Second Administrative Reforms Commission was constituted by the Government of India through a resolution of the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions dated 31 August 2005, with the mandate to prepare a detailed blueprint for revamping the public administration system. It was the second such body since Independence, the first Administrative Reforms Commission having functioned between 1966 and 1970 under the chairmanship of Morarji Desai and later K. Hanumanthaiah. The commission was originally chaired by M. Veerappa Moily, a former Chief Minister of Karnataka and Congress leader, who led it from 2005 until April 2009, when he resigned upon entering the Union Cabinet; V. Ramachandran subsequently chaired it for the remaining work. Its terms of reference covered the organisational structure of the Government of India, ethics in governance, refurbishing of personnel administration, strengthening of financial management systems, steps to ensure effective administration at the state level, and citizen-centric administration.

The commission operated as a deliberative advisory body rather than a statutory authority, meaning its recommendations carried no binding force and required acceptance by the Cabinet and, where relevant, legislative enactment by Parliament. Its working method involved commissioning studies, holding regional workshops and consultations with state governments, civil society organisations and serving officials, and inviting written submissions from the public and domain experts. Each thematic inquiry culminated in a discrete report, sequentially numbered and submitted to the Prime Minister's Office, which routed them to the concerned ministries for examination. The standard processing channel ran through the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances, which prepared Action Taken Notes that were placed before a Committee of Secretaries and ultimately a Group of Ministers for a decision on acceptance, modification or rejection of each individual recommendation.

Over its tenure the commission produced fifteen reports, beginning with the First Report, Right to Information: Master Key to Good Governance (June 2006), and the Fourth Report, Ethics in Governance, which proposed amendments to the Prevention of Corruption Act, a National Ombudsman framework, partial state funding of elections and reform of the Representation of the People Act. Other landmark reports included Crisis Management (Third), Public Order (Fifth), Local Governance (Sixth), Capacity Building for Conflict Resolution (Seventh), Combating Terrorism (Eighth), Social Capital (Ninth), Refurbishing of Personnel Administration (Tenth), Promoting e-Governance (Eleventh), Citizen Centric Administration (Twelfth), Organisational Structure of Government of India (Thirteenth), Strengthening Financial Management Systems (Fourteenth), and the concluding State and District Administration (Fifteenth, April 2009). The reports were notable for proposing measures such as a unified civil services examination structure, a fixed minimum tenure for officers, the codification of conduct rules and the constitutional protection of local government finances.

Several recommendations were translated into policy and statute. The Right to Information Act, 2005 had already been enacted, but the commission's first report shaped subsequent operationalisation and the debate on file notings. Its e-governance recommendations fed into the National e-Governance Plan and later the Digital India programme. The personnel administration report influenced the introduction of the 360-degree appraisal mechanism for empanelment of senior officers, adopted by the Department of Personnel and Training in the years that followed. The Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013, enacted under the Manmohan Singh government, drew conceptually on the Ethics in Governance report, though it departed from the commission's specific design in several respects.

The Second ARC must be distinguished from the First Administrative Reforms Commission (1966–1970), which focused heavily on machinery of government and redress of citizens' grievances, recommending among other things the institution of the Lokpal and Lokayukta. It should also not be conflated with statutory bodies such as the Union Public Service Commission, a constitutional recruitment authority under Articles 315–323, or with Finance Commissions and Pay Commissions, which have narrowly defined fiscal and remuneration mandates. The ARC was a one-time advisory commission, whereas the Central Vigilance Commission and the Comptroller and Auditor General are permanent oversight institutions; the ARC recommended reforms to such institutions rather than performing their functions.

A recurring controversy surrounds implementation. Of the several hundred recommendations across the fifteen reports, only a fraction were fully accepted and operationalised, and successive governments have been criticised for selective and slow uptake. The reports remain frequently cited in parliamentary debates, in Standing Committee deliberations and in litigation, yet no comprehensive statutory follow-through occurred. Debate has periodically arisen over whether a Third Administrative Reforms Commission should be constituted to address contemporary challenges including data governance, regulatory architecture and lateral entry into the bureaucracy, a measure the central government began piloting from 2018 onward and which echoes the commission's call for inducting domain specialists.

For the working practitioner, civil services aspirant and governance researcher, the Second ARC reports constitute a foundational reference text, particularly for the General Studies Paper II of the UPSC Civil Services Examination, where governance, transparency, accountability and institutional reform are core themes. Desk officers and policy analysts treat the reports as an authoritative compendium of reform options whose diagnoses of administrative pathologies — silos, weak accountability, poor citizen interface — remain pertinent. Because the recommendations span ethics, e-governance, federal devolution and crisis management, the corpus offers a durable analytical vocabulary for assessing the gap between India's stated governance aspirations and its administrative practice nearly two decades after the commission reported.