Why We Only Hear About Corrupt IAS Officers? - Anil Swarup

This story has been reinforced by two decades of media coverage to the point where questioning it feels naive.

Anil Swarup came on our podcast and questioned it.

His standing to do so is unusual. He spent 38 years in the IAS. He served under Kalyan Singh in Uttar Pradesh in his early career. He cleaned up after the Coal Scam as Coal Secretary. His work as Health Secretary became the foundation for what is now Ayushman Bharat. He has been inside the rooms where Indian governance actually happens for longer than most journalists writing about it have been alive.

What he said was that the default story is wrong.

“Majority of IAS officers are honest. Majority want to work. Give them the right environment and you will see the magic.”

I want to walk through how he arrived at that. Because the argument is more careful than the headline suggests, and it carries more weight than most takes on Indian bureaucracy because of who is delivering it.

The Newspaper Problem

His first move was to challenge the evidence base most of us actually use.

“What gets printed in the newspaper? The thing that is wrong gets printed more. The newspaper prints exceptions, not rules.”

He used the classical journalism aphorism. “Man bites dog gets printed. Dog bites man does not get printed, because biting is the dog’s nature.”

This is the structural problem with how media shapes our mental models of any large system. Journalism, by design, surfaces anomalies. Events that break from pattern are inherently more newsworthy than events that conform. A bureaucrat doing his job honestly for 30 years generates zero headlines. A bureaucrat caught in a raid generates dozens.

If you build your understanding of the IAS entirely from media coverage, you end up with a picture composed almost entirely of corruption cases. Not because corruption is dominant. Because corruption is what gets reported.

His point was not that corruption does not exist. “Of course corruption exists. I am not justifying it. It is wrong.”

His point was that generalising about the system from the visible cases is a basic statistical error. The unseen cases far outnumber the seen ones, and the unseen ones do not match the pattern of the seen.

The Bureaucracy As Horse

The most memorable framing was the Kalyan Singh quote he carried with him from his early career.

“Kalyan Singh used to say that the bureaucracy is the horse. The rider determines how the horse runs.”

This is sophisticated organisational thinking. The bureaucracy as a system is morally neutral. It can be made to produce good outcomes or bad outcomes depending on how it is directed.

The horse does not decide its own course. The rider does. A leader who signals that corruption is tolerable as long as the work gets done will produce a corrupt bureaucracy. A leader who signals that integrity matters and will be rewarded will produce an honest one.

Anil Swarup extended this. “The decision-maker decides whether to promote a corrupt officer or an efficient honest one. What signal does that send? If the signal is ‘you can be corrupt as long as you do my work,’ you have created the problem.”

The political class, in this framing, is more responsible for bureaucratic corruption than the bureaucracy itself. Officers respond to incentives. The incentives are set by political masters. Change the incentives and you change the behaviour.

This does not absolve corrupt officers. It does complicate the moral picture. The question is not just “are these individuals corrupt.” The question is “what system created the rewards that made corruption rational for them.”

The Role Model Inversion

The second critique was about who we hold up as representative of the bureaucracy.

“I have written books with the names of officers who have been my role models. One after another. Outstanding officers. Why are we not presenting them? Why are we presenting the corrupt officer who went to jail?”

This is the question that should bother anyone who cares about Indian governance.

The cultural lens through which the IAS is viewed today is heavily skewed toward its failures. Every prominent IAS story in popular media is about corruption, transfer politics, or institutional capture. TV serials, films, news cycles, social media discourse all reinforce the corrupt-officer archetype.

Where are the popular cultural representations of the IAS officer who cleaned up a district, who built a school system, who reformed a procurement process? They exist, but they live in books almost nobody reads, in obscure documentaries, in occasional features that disappear within a news cycle.

The asymmetry of cultural attention has consequences. Young people who might otherwise aspire to the IAS see only the cautionary tales. Young officers who join the service see only the cynical role models. The cycle reinforces itself.

Anil Swarup’s argument is not that we should hide the corruption stories. They should be told. Officers who go to jail should go to jail. The argument is that we should also tell the other stories, and we mostly do not.

The Nexus Of Good

The philosophical core of his argument is what he calls the Nexus of Good. It is the title of his book and the framing through which he now operates.

“Good can happen because good is happening. That is the foundation. The question is whether we are presenting good in an appropriate manner so as to inspire others to do good work.”

This is a generative position rather than a purely critical one. Most public commentary on Indian governance is critical. The system is broken. The officers are corrupt. Nothing works.

Critique is necessary. Critique alone is corrosive. It produces a culture in which people who want to do good work either leave the system or stop trying, because they cannot see any examples of good work succeeding within it.

The Nexus of Good framing inverts this. It says: good work is happening. It is happening more often than the headlines would suggest. The role of public conversation is to surface that good work so that the next generation of officers, leaders, and citizens has examples to aspire to.

This is not the same as denying the bad. Anil Swarup was clear about that. “It does not mean that mismanagement is not happening. A lot of mismanagement is happening. The question is who we are presenting as our role model.”

The Masala Problem

The host pushed back gently. If incentives in the system reward negative behaviour, should we not be incentivising positive behaviour structurally?

Anil Swarup’s response was practical. He thought formal incentives were less important than cultural ones.

“All of us love masala. We all love masala. If you go talk to someone about something good, they look here and there. Talk about masala, they will listen carefully with both ears.”

This is the deep cultural problem. Indian public discourse rewards sensationalism, scandal, and conflict. It does not reward stories of quiet competence. TV channels run only negative content. Social media amplifies only the inflammatory.

He noticed a related shift. “TV channels are now losing money. Big businessmen bought them and they are taking losses. YouTube channels have become more prominent. People want to hear good things too. Maybe we are just not telling them.”

This is an interesting hypothesis. The decline of cable news in India parallels the decline of cable news everywhere else. The rise of long-form podcast and YouTube content suggests an audience hungry for substantive, less sensationalised conversations.

If that is the trend, then the cultural opportunity is real. Platforms that present good role models, substantive analysis, and constructive stories may find audiences that cable news has stopped serving. The Nexus of Good is not just a philosophy. It is a content strategy.

His Personal Resolution

The last part of his framing was personal. He explicitly chose to focus only on what he could control.

“At this age, I do not talk about others. I talk about myself and the person I am talking to. What can you do? You are doing this podcast. You are bringing good people. When you broadcast it, people will understand there are good people too. You are fulfilling the responsibility you should fulfil.”

This is wisdom from a man who has decided, after 38 years inside the system, that the most productive thing he can do is amplify good work rather than catalogue bad work. The catalogue exists. Others can write it. His remaining time is better spent on the generative side.

What I Took Away

Three things from this segment will stay with me.

The newspaper aphorism. “Man bites dog gets printed. Dog bites man does not.” This is a useful corrective for anyone who builds their understanding of any large system from media coverage. The exceptions are reported. The rules are not.

The Kalyan Singh framing. The bureaucracy as a horse, the rider as the determinant, is a cleaner way to think about how organisations behave than most management theories. The political class shapes bureaucratic behaviour more than the bureaucracy shapes itself.

The Nexus of Good philosophy. The proposition that good can happen because good is already happening, and that the structural opportunity is to present good in ways that inspire more good, is generous, hopeful, and practical at once. It is also rare in current Indian public discourse.

You may disagree with Anil Swarup’s optimism about the IAS. You may believe the corruption is deeper than he is willing to acknowledge. Either way, the segment is worth engaging with because it comes from someone who spent 38 years inside the system and is not naive.

Watch the full episode here: