502 Book Reviews

as a lady collector, but at last accepted the special courtesies that are normally
extended to a lady officer. In her household also, her relatives belonging to
IAS club tried to ‘advice’, to quote Mrs Meenakshi, ‘a more sophisticated way
of saying “criticize”’ her on every aspect of her office life. But her mother-in-law
came to her support and ordained that ‘I should be left free to run my district the
way I wanted’. Mrs Meenakshi hosted Mrs Indira Gandhi and Mr Rajiv Gandhi,
the then PM to her district. She was awarded a merit certificate for the revenue
work in the district on Independence Day.
To sum up, the book in question sheds light on multifarious aspects of
administration, challenges of development, and day-to-day management of rural,
urban, tribal, hilly areas of India and also anecdotes related to PMs beginning
from Pandit Nehru, to Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and P.V. Narasimha Rao. The
two very able editors—Professor Ramesh K. Arora and Professor C.K. Sardana—
have done a stupendous job in reaching out to senior IAS (retd.) officers and obtain-
ing exclusive articles from them.
The book will serve as a primary source material for research on
issues/subjects related to Public Administration. It will also be a great help as
a reference book on the history of development of district administration. The
contents of the book, on the one hand, serve as a travelogue, yet, they also give
a vibrant feel of the times we have lived before and that also unfolding on the
canvas of the future, on the other.

Gyan Vardhan Pathak

Former Professor, Political Science and Public Administration
Institute for Excellence in Higher Education, Bhopal, MP
Former Professor, HUDCO Chair and Visiting Faculty, R.C.V.P. Noronha
Academy of Administration and Management Bhopal, MP
[email protected]

Radhakrishan Sapru, Public Policy: A Contemporary Perspective.

New Delhi: SAGE Publications India, 2017, 384 pp., `395. ISBN:
978-93-860-6217-8 (Paper Back).
DOI:10.1177/0019556117720604

Public Policy as a discipline has a short history. Although its intellectual seeds
were sown in the year 1951, it has achieved stupendous success in changing
the landscape of academic and government organisations. Distinctively, public
policies can be traced back to the beginnings of civilisation itself, but the contem-
porary perspectives have a post-World War II flavour.
Ever since the formation of governments in the civilised nations, public
policies have been recognised as instruments of governance. They play a meaning-
ful role in moving the social system from the past to the future. They help to shape
the future. As goals, public policies are made in the present, based on the past
events with the object of improving the society’s future. The purpose of studying
public policy is to understand the problems of the people and to provide insights
Book Reviews 503

into a range of policy choices to deal with matters of public concern. The concept
of public policy presupposes that there is an area or domain of life which had to do
with those spheres which are labelled as public.
The problem of public policy is ultimately how the future is grasped and
appraised. An important objective of the study of public policy is to help us when
government action is justifiable to promote specific objectives such as social
justice, equity or efficacy and which policies can reasonably be expected to realise
those objectives. The study of public policy is of great significance as it deals
with problems of the people. Therefore, a book on the subject is welcome and
timely. R.K. Sapru, who has retired as professor from the Department of Public
Administration, Panjab University, Chandigarh, is eminently qualified to deal with
the subject of public policy.
The present work Public Policy: A Contemporary Perspective is devoted to dis-
cussion in 19 chapters ranging from a policy-making process to policy implemen-
tation, monitoring, evaluation and policy learning. It provides a critical insight into
the varied approaches and models on policy analysis. Chapters 10, 11 and 12 of
the work put all those elements of policy-making together by considering modern
theories of the policy process.
This textbook starts with an overview of the idea of policy studies as both an
academic discipline and applied science. The author reviews on what makes policy
studies an appropriate endeavour for scientific study, even when the subject of
study seems to be so irrational.
The book offers an overview of key social, economic and political trends that
influence public policies in democratic countries. This discussion is particularly
important, as most policy scholars acknowledge the importance of the structure
and rules under which the game of politics is played. The various institutions and
people who make public policy are described in Chapters 2, 3, 7 and 8.
Groups’ power and agenda-setting are reviewed in Chapter 5. The issue of
policy design to anticipate and address policy gaps and distortions is discussed in
Chapter 6. Chapter 9 focuses on the analysis of the policy process. It deals with
policy analytical frameworks and varieties. A fascinating aspect of policy process
is to understand how policy is shaped by social, political, economic and other
environmental factors.
Closely related to policy design and tool choice is policy implementation
and arguments of failure which the author discusses in Chapters 15, 16, 17 and
18. Policy implementation is a well-studied aspect of the policy process, which
considers the oft-forgotten work that follows the excitement of policy enactment.
Because of the problems inherent in policy design and implementation, policy
often fails to meet their goals.
Chapters 13 and 14 consider issues of policy decision-making process, tools
and techniques. Chapters 19 and 20 examine evaluation approaches and impact
of policies. The complexity of policy-making with interconnectedness of policy
impacts, but disjoined policy design often causes policy failure.
Chapter 21 focuses more on the idea of policy science as social science.
This chapter presents a vision of future where policy science works towards its
goal of proving societally relevant knowledge to create successful public policy
development.
504 Book Reviews

The merit of the book is to reiterate the importance of public policy as the base
for good governance. The author’s effort is directed towards reconciling the desire
for the best with the demand for authoritative rich material for the readers. This
textbook includes an extensive glossary of terms used in policy studies to better
serve as such a reference to some of the classic works in the field of public policy.

Pardeep Sahni
Chairman, Public Administration Faculty
School of Social Sciences
Indira Gandhi National Open University
[email protected]

Sudhanshu Ranjan, Justice, Judocracy and Democracy in India: Boundaries

and Breaches. New Delhi, London and New York: Routledge, Taylor &
Francis Group, 2016, 28 + 377 pp., `895.
DOI: 10.1177/0019556117720599

Law grows with the growth of society and civilisation. Rule of law and not of
person/s is the key component of good governance. The three principles of natural
justice, namely nemo judex in causa sua, audi alteram partem and reasoned deci-
sion, have been governing the courts across the globe. Truth and justice are two
different things and it has been the primary duty of courts to bring out the truth
and provide justice to the litigants. Along with India in other countries also the
courts and judges are considered the institutions of the highest repute. The
common men always have faith and great expectations from the courts. And when
it is either the High Court or the Supreme Court, the degree of faith, respect and
expectation goes higher in comparison to the lower courts.
But judges are also human beings. The term ‘judocracy’ coined by the author
of the book under review affirms the same. The third chapter of the book, that
is, ‘Appointment of Judges to the Higher Judiciary’, shows the bare reality with
regard to the appointments in higher judiciary. The author has described the
system of appointment of judges in different countries such as the USA, UK,
South Africa, etc. and has reached the conclusion that India is the only country
where judges appoint judges (pp. 208, 209). The author has pointed out that in the
higher judicial appointments in India, there is neither transparency nor is seniority
respected always. The extent of judicial oligarchy goes up to creation of Pathshala
for a particular caste or securing that the chief justice of the High Court should not
be of any other community than the particular one (p. 210). The moral of the story
is that in appointments of judges to the higher courts, the caste and community
bias plays an important role (which obviously remains off the record). The author
has brought ‘off the record things’, ‘on the record’ for the public at large and
exposed them to the public. The vast research of the author could be seen on every
page of not only in this chapter but also on each page of the book. Therefore, in
‘Afterwords’ the author has discussed the appointment of judges in the Supreme