Years ago, my son Suraj, then a research student, wanted to know how the government works and asked me to write about it. Despite long years in the Indian Administrative Service, I little knew how to describe how government works. I made a note in my mind.

Towards the end of my administrative career, I began to feel that I could work not just within existing frames of government but more importantly, on the frame of government itself, to make actions and outcomes more effective. That was a breakthrough. The product was an innovative, participatory approach to creating road infrastructure. It involved reconceiving how to get something done within a specific domain of the government, drafting and facilitating a law (the Kerala Road Fund Board Act) and a new way of organising the work and decisions around it. One of its projects was a capital city road programme that brought different actors together: the mayor, city councillors, state legislators, and other politicians and bureaucrats. Frequent interactions with the mayor and councillors energised the programme considerably. I began appreciating the deep potential of local leadership for local action. Local elections had been stabilised by then. They generated leaders with remarkable capabilities, interest in city development and intimacy with city localities. I wondered how well they were performing. The monsoons were a good opportunity to gauge this. In the capital city, the annual stormwater surge inundates downtown areas just across from the state government headquarters and floods the central bus and railway terminals. As an almost repeat annual feature, government ministers rush to the spot and hold conferences while the mayor looks on helplessly. Getting stormwater flushed out – could the mayor's team not do it? This was a dramatic instance of the fact that even with constitutional changes to empower city government, local leaders were not running local public affairs. It needed the state government to drain out stormwater, and that too, not one government minister but four because it concerned four departments (water, roads, transport and local government). And did the four ministers succeed? No. After a while, a government order (GO) was issued to proclaim that the problem should be resolved. Each department – by this time the number of concerned departments had climbed to a dozen – went on to do one thing or the other but ultimately the GO could not get them to address the problem.