The IAS Officer Who Saw Politics from Inside: A 38-Year Insider Finally Speaks | Anil Swarup

What a retired IAS officer who survived cancer, served five governments, and helped birth Ayushman Bharat taught me about corruption, courage, and the art of making things actually happen

A conversation with Anil Swarup, Founder Chairman of Nexus of Good, former Secretary of School Education and Coal, Government of India, and author of five books, including Encounters with Politicians.

There is a moment in every reformer’s career that tests their theory of change.

For Anil Swarup, it came when he needed to recover Rs 50 crore from a financial institution that had been running at a loss for seven years. He had already convinced SIDBI to write off Rs 170 crore in interest if he could pay back Rs 80 crore in principal, a deal that took research, nerve, and the quiet threat of a CBI referral to get done.

But now he needed Rs 50 crore. And he had none.

So he did something that shocked his peers. He invited the most corrupt officer in the organization for tea.

“I told him: you’ve done what you’ve done. Bheeti taahi bisaar de. Forget what happened. Now help me. If this institution survives, there’s something in it for everyone. If it doesn’t, there’s nothing left for anyone to take.”

The corrupt officer agreed. He got to work. They recovered most of the money. The institution turned profitable for the first time in seven years.

When Swarup later invited the same officer for tea again and asked what had changed, the man said: “Sir, every time you publicly thanked me in front of 300 people, my chest swelled. The kick I got from being recognized like that was something I had never felt before.”

This story is not about excusing corruption. It is about the gap between principle and pragmatism that every person working inside any large institution must eventually navigate. And nobody has navigated that gap more thoughtfully over four decades of Indian public life than Anil Swarup.

Part 1: The Man Who Said the Coal Scam Was Manufactured

When Anil Swarup was appointed Coal Secretary in 2014, he inherited the wreckage of what the CAG had called India’s biggest scam. He spent his first months examining the actual files.

What he found surprised him.

“The CAG made calculation errors. I showed this in my first book. Nobody has disputed me since. Nobody has written back to say I was wrong.”

The specific error: the CAG calculated notional profit by using average mining cost across all coal blocks. But mining is not average. The deeper you go, the more expensive it gets. Every mine has its own cost structure. Using a blanket average produced numbers that were, in his view, demonstrably inflated.

The larger problem was what calling it a scam did to the bureaucratic machinery.

“Joint secretaries stopped putting their names on files. Nobody wanted to be the one who made a decision that could later be called a scam. Even when we were conducting proper auctions, people were afraid to commit.”

He draws a distinction that he thinks gets lost in public discourse: bona fide mistakes are not corruption. A decision taken in good faith, with the information available at the time, that turns out to be wrong is not a crime. Treating it as one creates a bureaucracy that stops deciding, which is arguably worse than one that occasionally errs.

The most honest officer he encountered in the entire coal ministry, he said, was a man whose first name happened to be Harishchandra. That man was subjected to years of inquiry on the back of the scam narrative. It was, Swarup said, unjust.

Part 2: The Education Mafia Nobody Saw Coming

When Swarup moved from Coal to School Education, he expected to find a different kind of challenge. What he found was a different kind of mafia. One he had not anticipated.

In the coal sector, the mafia is visible. It operates where the coal is, which is underground but at least geographically traceable.

“In education, the mafia is all underground. You cannot see it. But it is extraordinary.”

The specific case: B.Ed and D.El.Ed teacher training colleges. When he came in, there were roughly 16,000 such colleges in India. He was told that approximately 4,000 of them existed only on paper. One room. No students. No faculty. Degrees issued.

He launched a process to identify and close these colleges, getting affidavits requiring accurate information under penalty of imprisonment. The colleges panicked because they had nothing to disclose that was real.

They went to court. Seventeen courts in total. Three High Courts granted stays.

He had gotten political clearance from every chief minister across party lines: Mamata Banerjee, Yogi Adityanath, others. All agreed the problem was real and needed solving. But when their constituency-level backers were threatened with closure, the legal machinery opened up.

The Education Minister at the time, Prakash Javadekar, decided to withdraw the fight rather than continue the court battle. The chairman of the National Council for Teacher Education, who had led the charge, resigned in protest.

“That was one of the biggest failures of my career. I could not stop his resignation. We lost that fight.”

The silver lining, he said, is that the New Education Policy has restructured the entire teacher training system, which will eventually clean out the fraudulent operators. But it was a reminder that even when political will exists at the top, institutional mafias have multiple layers of legal and procedural protection.

Part 3: The Cheating Industry He Witnessed in 1985

On his first posting as a young SDM in Kushinagar in 1985, his driver pulled up outside a board exam center early one morning and told him to watch.

As soon as Swarup’s vehicle appeared, people jumped out of windows.

They were external helpers who had come to facilitate cheating. His presence sent them fleeing.

The next morning the driver took him to a different center. Quiet. Calm. Seemingly normal.

“The driver told me: sir, they just opened the question paper. They are solving it in the mango orchard. When they finish, they will come back and distribute the answers.”

He later discovered that exam centers in that district were being given on contract to operators who would facilitate cheating. The center was not an educational institution in any meaningful sense. It was a cheating franchise.

“I wrote this in the book. I saw it with my own eyes. We are playing with the future of the country.”

His deepest concern about education policy is the time horizon mismatch between politicians and outcomes. Education returns compound over decades. A politician’s planning horizon ends at the next election.

“We will distribute Rs 30,000 crore in Rs 10,000 cash transfers to win an election. But we will not put the same money into education because the returns are 10 years away. And the politician does not care about 10 years away.”

India’s education budget, he noted, still sits well below the 6 percent of GDP target set in the National Education Policy. In the period from 2014 to 2016, allocation was declining year on year. He flagged this as education secretary and the number increased in 2017. Then it fell again.

Part 4: How He Killed the Coal Mafia Without Touching It

One of the most elegant frameworks in the conversation came when he described how he neutralized the coal mafia in his tenure without confronting it directly.

His theory: mafia thrives on shortage. When a product or service is scarce, there is rent to be extracted. People pay to get what they cannot otherwise access. Remove the scarcity and you remove the mafia’s reason for existing.

“I did not fight the mafia. I just asked: how do we increase production?”

Coal production under his tenure set records in 2014-15 and 2015-16. The increased supply reduced the value of what the mafia was trading in. There was no black market to run when there was enough coal.

“We were even thinking about exporting coal to Bangladesh. At that point, what does the mafia do?”

He acknowledged that mafias in other parts of the coal ecosystem persisted. But in the block allocation and auction space where the scam narrative had been centered, the system he built in 2015 continues to function without corruption eleven years later.

“I guarantee it. Not one paisa can go sideways in coal block auctions today. The system we built in 2015 is still running and it still works.”

The parallel he draws to education: the cheating mafia exists because there is a demand for cheating, driven by a system that certifies rather than actually trains. If certification systems improve and employers stop treating degrees as proxies for competence, the cheating mafia loses its market.

Part 5: The Honest Politician Who Changed His Mind About Them All

When Swarup started as an IAS officer, he was convinced that all of India’s social problems were caused by politicians. He would meet any politician who came to him with a prejudice already in place. He fought with several of them.

Then he was posted with Kalyan Singh in Uttar Pradesh.

“I could not have imagined that a politician could be honest. And this man was honest in a way that I learned from.”

The incident that crystallized it: he mentioned offhandedly to Kalyan Singh one morning that Singh’s son had been using a CDO’s official vehicle. Kalyan Singh turned the entire convoy around, went home, dealt with the situation internally, and they continued to the meeting. By evening, the vehicle had been returned.

A chief minister had made his own son return a car.

“Today that would be considered normal for someone’s son to use a government vehicle. Kalyan Singh treated it as a serious violation.”

Singh told him something he has carried ever since: “If your kurta is clean, even one spot will be visible. If your kurta is dirty, spots keep falling and no one notices. Do not let the first spot fall.”

This experience changed how he thought about every politician he subsequently dealt with. He stopped assuming bad faith. He started asking how to present his case in a way that would resonate with whoever was in front of him.

“You are selling jalebi. Does he want it more sweet or less sweet? Orange colored or pink? In a plate or a leaf bowl? You need to know what he wants before you try to sell him the same jalebi.”

This is how he eventually convinced Modi to approve what became Ayushman Bharat. The health insurance scheme he had architected under UPA had been buried by a three-member committee of secretaries who did not understand it. Three years later, the PMO called him and asked him to come explain it to Modi directly.

He spent fifteen minutes in that meeting. Modi listened without interrupting.

“People know that Modi speaks well. What I found is that he listens even better.”

When Swarup left the room, a joint secretary said: “Sir, he was annoyed when he came in. You said your piece anyway.”

Swarup’s response: “I don’t need anything now. I won’t need anything after retirement. I said what I thought was right. The rest is his decision.”

Part 6: Why Most IAS Officers Are Honest and Why It Does Not Matter

Swarup is direct about the public perception problem facing the bureaucracy.

What newspapers cover is the exception, not the rule. A corrupt officer makes news because corruption is the exception. But readers generalize from the exception to the entire institution.

“If a dog bites a man, it does not make news. If a man bites a dog, it does. We are reading about the man biting the dog and concluding that all men bite dogs.”

His estimate: the majority of IAS officers are honest and want to do good work. They are shaped by the same incentives and the same cultural environment as everyone else, which means some will be corrupt, but the majority are working with integrity.

The problem is not honesty. The problem is efficiency.

“Honesty alone is not enough. It is a necessary condition, not a sufficient condition. If you are honest but not efficient, you are useless to the institution and to the people it serves.”

He uses E. Sreedharan as his example. Metro Man is remembered not because he was honest, which many officers are, but because he was both honest and efficient. He delivered things on time and under budget repeatedly. That combination is rare and worth celebrating.

His advice to young IAS officers who feel stuck: identify what you can change and do that completely before complaining about what you cannot change. Nobody has told you to come late to work. Nobody has told you to sit on files. Nobody has told you to be inaccessible to the public. Those are choices you are making and attributing to the system.

“Dust was on the face. But you spent your life polishing the mirror.”

Part 7: He Wrote a Book During Chemotherapy

Swarup had written two books by the time he was diagnosed with third to fourth stage lymphoma.

“It had spread through my body. I could not sit for more than fifteen minutes at a time.”

In those fifteen-minute windows, he wrote his third book.

He laughs about it now. “I thought I might not have much time. Might as well write one more.”

That book, No More a Civil Servant, introduced his organization Nexus of Good, which documents and amplifies good work happening across India’s public sector and civil society. The premise is that good things are happening everywhere, but we present only the failures and exceptions. If we changed what we present, we would change what people believe is possible.

“Good can happen because good is happening. The question is whether we are presenting good in a way that inspires others to do good.”

He survived the cancer. He went on to write a fourth and fifth book. He is currently writing his sixth, Corruption in Governance.

Part 8: Eight Conditions for an Idea to Actually Work

The most practically useful framework Swarup shared is one he developed over four decades of watching excellent ideas fail at implementation.

An idea, he said, is the easy part. Everyone has ideas. The hard part is making the idea happen. For that, the idea must satisfy eight conditions simultaneously:

It must be politically acceptable. Without political support, nothing moves in a democracy.

It must be socially desirable. The people it affects must believe it benefits them.

It must be technologically feasible. You need the tools and systems to actually execute.

It must be financially viable. There has to be a way to fund it.

It must be administratively doable. The institutional capacity to implement must exist or be built.

It must be judicially tenable. It must survive legal challenge.

It must be emotionally relatable. The beneficiaries must feel, not just understand, that this is for them.

It must be environmentally sustainable. The solution cannot create new problems.

“Most reformers fail not because their idea is wrong but because they satisfy three of these eight and call it done. The B.Ed college reform had political acceptability. It had social desirability. But it did not survive judicial challenge.”

He particularly emphasized emotional relatability, which he said is the most underestimated of the eight.

“When I take a decision as a secretary, if I make my team feel that this is our decision, not just my decision, they will implement it with their whole heart. The day they feel it belongs to them, everything changes.”

Part 9: Five Lessons From Thirty-Eight Years

He was asked near the end to distill everything he had learned into advice for young people.

First: use your time well. Do not waste it on the past, which you cannot change. Learn from your mistakes and move on. Do not lose sleep over what you cannot control.

Second: do not be afraid of mistakes. Everyone makes them. The only people who never make mistakes are the people who never try anything.

Third: stop trying to impress others. The haircut you choose, the clothes you wear, choose them for yourself. Living for other people’s opinions is a permanent drain on your energy and attention.

Fourth: focus only on what you can change. If you focus on what you can, what you can grows. If you are preoccupied with what you cannot, you cannot even do what you can.

Fifth: never stop learning. Every moment contains something to learn. The person who keeps learning keeps growing.

He ended with a verse: “Khud ko kar buland itna ki har taqdir se pehle, Khuda bande se khud pooche bata teri raza kya hai.” Raise yourself so high that before destiny writes your fate, God himself asks: what is it that you want?

The One Thing

If there is a single thread running through everything Anil Swarup said, it is this:

Systems do not change themselves. People do. And the people who change systems are not the ones who wait for perfect conditions. They are the ones who identify what they can do right now, in this system, with these constraints, and do that completely.

He digitized an entire ministry in 2014. He killed a coal mafia by increasing production rather than fighting the mafia directly. He got a suspended officer reinstated by acknowledging a mistake to a chief minister rather than confronting her. He convinced a prime minister to launch a national health insurance scheme by spending fifteen minutes explaining why it was politically useful.

None of these were perfect solutions. All of them moved things forward.

That, he would say, is what governance actually is. Not the ideal solution. The possible solution, executed with enough skill and enough persistence to matter.