The Missing Lever: Accountability
- Dr Sp Mishra
- Mar 19
- 4 min read
This Will Decide if and When India Becomes a Developed Nation (ICC Blog # 159)
Very recently, 12 patients died in a fire incident at SCB Medical College, Cuttack and Hospital.
Pause for a moment and think about that.
This did not happen on a highway, or in some remote, poorly connected region. This happened inside an ICU — a place that represents the highest standard of care and safety for patients who are already fighting for recovery.
If an ICU is not safe, then what is?
The uncomfortable truth is that this is not an isolated incident. It is part of a pattern that repeats itself across the country. We have seen train accidents, aircraft and helicopter crashes, fires in hospitals, dangerously maintained roads in cities and towns, and complete breakdowns in basic systems like solid waste management.
None of these are natural disasters. These are human-created failures. And anything that is human-created can, in principle, be fixed by humans.
Yet, they keep happening.
India does not lack laws. It does not lack institutions. It does not lack authorities. We have the police, the judiciary, political leadership, and a full civil administrative structure that is meant to ensure order and safety. On paper, the system is complete.
But in reality, something critical is missing.
Accountability.
An accident, by itself, is not the real problem. No system in the world can guarantee that failures will never happen. But repetition of the same type of failure is not an accident anymore — it is a system failure.
So what should happen after an incident like this?
At the very least, there should be absolute clarity on what went wrong, who was responsible at each stage, and what action has been taken as per the law. This should not remain buried inside files or internal communications. It should be visible, accessible, and understandable to the public.
But that is not what typically happens.
Instead, committees are formed, reports are written, statements are made, and slowly, the issue fades away from public memory. Over time, even basic questions become difficult to answer. What exactly happened? Who was responsible? What action was taken?
For an ordinary citizen, finding these answers is not straightforward. It requires digging through scattered information, verifying incomplete reports, and trying to piece together a coherent picture. Most people neither have the time nor the incentive to do this.
And so, we move on.
This is where the deeper problem lies. We are operating within a non-transparent culture where information is not easily accessible, responsibility is diffused, and accountability is rarely visible. Over time, this becomes normalized. The absence of clarity reduces public pressure, and without pressure, systems do not change.
If India is serious about becoming a developed nation, this cannot continue.
At a minimum, every major public failure should leave behind a clear, publicly available record — what happened, how it happened, who was responsible, and what action followed. Responsibility should not be vague or collective to the point of meaninglessness. It should be specific and traceable across the chain of command. And most importantly, action should be time-bound and visible, not something that disappears into the system.
This is not about public shaming for the sake of it. It is about creating deterrence and building trust. When people know that failures will be examined seriously and consequences will follow, behavior changes. Systems improve.
It also does something equally important — it builds civic awareness. When citizens, especially young people, can easily access and understand past failures and the actions taken, it raises the baseline expectation from institutions. And higher expectations are what ultimately drive better governance.
There is a tendency to believe that development is primarily about economic growth — higher GDP, larger consumption, expanding markets. But that is only one part of the story.
A country becomes truly developed when its systems are reliable. When failures are not frequent, and when they do occur, they are investigated deeply and lead to visible, structural improvements.
That is where India still has work to do.
The hard truth is that accountability is uncomfortable. It requires naming responsibility, enforcing consequences, and accepting that institutions can fail. But without this discomfort, there is no real progress.
India’s journey to becoming a developed nation will not be decided only by how fast the economy grows. It will be decided by whether we are willing to fix this one missing lever.
Because until accountability is built into the system in a visible and consistent way, failures will repeat, public trust will erode, and progress will remain incomplete.
To ask these questions and many more, we have started an initiative called the
Youth Voice for a New India 100 Youth.
100 Voices. One New India.
India will turn 100 in 2047. The question is no longer whether India will rise—but how, for whom, and with whose voices shaping that journey.
Why This Series
Young Indians between the ages of 20 and 25 will play the most important roles in shaping India’s future and increasingly, the future of the world. By 2047, today’s youth will be leaders, innovators, policymakers, and institution builders.
Yet most conversations about India@2047 focus on experts predicting the future, not on young Indians articulating it. Youth Voice for a New India exists to change that.
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