Civil Services

Every district in British India needed someone to collect revenue, keep the peace and answer to Calcutta. That someone was, for a century and a half, almost always British. This topic follows two connected stories: how the civil service that ran India was built and slowly, reluctantly opened to Indians, and how a parallel effort tried to push some of that power down to local bodies — municipalities and district boards — instead of keeping it all in Calcutta and Whitehall.

In two minutes

The civil services moved from Company patronage, to competitive examination on paper from 1853, to formal review by the Aitchison and Lee Commissions pushing gradual Indianisation, while a separate line of reform — Mayo's Resolution and Ripon's Resolution on local self-government — tried to give municipalities and district boards a real, if limited, share of local administration.

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