A hundred days of disappointment

India Today has reported a new India-focused governance development: “Karnataka IAS officer goes missing amid corruption row, last traced to airport.” The publisher's feed describes the story as follows: Karnataka IAS officer goes missing amid corruption row, last traced to airport Intellectual Janata Party includes this item for public-affairs discovery and context only; readers should use the original publisher link for the complete report, full sourcing and any subsequent updates.

The 2022 judgment upholding the ten percent Economically Weaker Sections quota, which excludes existing SC, ST and OBC beneficiaries, marked a significant departure from the logic that has governed Indian reservation since 1992. It has emboldened new claims from dominant castes and unsettled the fifty percent ceiling. The ruling's narrow five-judge majority conceals a genuine and unresolved argument about what reservation is for.

Bihar's 2023 caste survey reignited a decades-old demand for a national caste census, framed as the missing evidence base for reservation policy. Better enumeration would sharpen welfare targeting and expose the mismatch between population share and quota allocation. But caste counts cannot by themselves resolve the harder political questions of the fifty percent ceiling, sub-categorisation and who counts as backward.

India's bureaucracy has grown in scope far faster than in skill or numbers, leaving a thin cadre of generalist officers responsible for outcomes that require deep technical knowledge. Lateral entry and mission-mode reforms have chipped at the edges but left the core architecture untouched. The result is a state that announces ambitious schemes and then struggles, quietly, to implement them.