During the Constituent Assembly Debates, a seductive assumption gained ground: that the strength of the Union is proportional to the breadth of its powers. A strong nation, it was believed, required a Union that commanded as many legislative, administrative, and financial domains as possible. Against this prevailing intuition, K Santhanam sounded a warning of rare clarity. He observed:
"I too am anxious to have a strong Government for this country but my conception of strength of Centre is rather different....The initial responsibility for the well-being of the people of the provinces should rest with the Provincial Governments. It is only in strictly all-India matters that the Central Government should have responsibility and should come into play. Therefore, the strength of a Centre consists not only in adequate powers in all-India subjects but freedom from responsibility for those subjects which are not germane to all-India but which really should be in the Provincial field. It is in this positive as well as negative delimitation of powers that a real federal system rests and I think the federal powers as defined by the Committee report err on the wrong side. It tries to burden the Centre with all kinds of powers which it ought not to have.... There is almost an obsession that by adding all kinds of powers, to the Centre, we can make it strong."
- K Santhanam, Constituent Assembly Debates (1947)
Santhanam criticised the indiscriminate transfer of subjects from the Provincial List of the Government of India Act, 1935, into the Union and Concurrent Lists. He questioned why matters such as "vagrancy" should concern all of India, and warned that placing "economic planning" in the Concurrent List would enable the Centre .intrude into provincial domains - even agriculture - preventing States from planning in their own way.
Two decades later, at the 1970 National Convention on Union-State Relations in New Delhi, he sharpened this critique. A Centre that assumes too many obligations, he cautioned, becomes "incurably weak". Real strength lies in focus:
"It is only through concentration on essential All-India matters... and by giving complete autonomy to the States in the rest of the field... that the Central Government can be really strong."
What Santhanam articulated as political instinct-a strong Union is not one that does everything, but one that knows what not to do- finds powerful validation in economics and management theory.
David Ricardo's "principle of comparative advantage" teaches that an entity should specialise in activities where its opportunity cost is lowest, not necessarily those where it is absolutely superior. Even if a CEO is more efficient at typing than his assistant, it would be irrational for him to spend time typing, because every such hour displaces time needed for strategic decisions only he can make.
The same logic applies to federal governance. Even if the Union, with its access to vast resources, elite expertise, and a highly trained bureaucracy, could design a better school curriculum or manage public health more efficiently than individual States-and even if we assume it is superior at every single task States perform that "absolute advantage" does not justify central control. The decisive consideration is not relative competence but opportunity cost.
The opportunity cost of the Union straying into State subjects is the neglect of its own sovereign responsibilities. The Union possesses a clear comparative advantage - indeed, in many domains, a monopoly over all-India matters such as defence, external affairs, currency and monetary stability, macroeconomic management, trade negotiations, and frontier sciences. Time and money devoted to implementing rural sanitation schemes, administering universities, or operating ports functions handled by States or local bodies in most mature federations are resources diverted from responsibilities that only the Union can fulfil.
In his seminal essay "What is Strategy?" (Harvard Business Review, 1996), Michael Porter wrote:
"The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do....Trade-offs are essential to strategy. They create the need for choice and purposefully limit what a company offers."
He cited the examples of IKEA, Southwest Airlines, Neutrogena, and the Vanguard Group, which succeeded not by trying to be everything to everyone, but by ruthlessly pruning activities that did not fit their specific value proposition. By limiting their scope, they deepened their competence.
Currently, the Union refuses to make these strategic trade-offs. It seeks to be the primary agent of change in every sector, from space exploration to rural sanitation. Huge Union Ministries exist for almost every subject in the State List, creating a "shadow bureaucracy" that duplicates State functions. Through conditional Finance Commission grants, proliferating Centrally Sponsored Schemes, rigid guidelines, and work-by-work approvals, the Union increasingly dictates State priorities instead of allocating untied funds or offering a limited, optional menu of schemes. The result is a governance deficit in which the Union is distracted, the States are dependent, and citizens lack a clear line of responsibility.
In Competing for the Future (1994), CK Prahalad and Gary Hamel cautioned against the "conglomerate trap," in which large organisations dissipate value by straying from their core strengths into peripheral domains where they lack deep expertise. Such organisations become mediocre at everything, excellent at nothing. Enduring success lies in protecting core competencies - the small set of capabilities that defines an organisation's strategic identity - while divesting from activities where it lacks a comparative advantage.
The Indian Union risks resembling such a bloated conglomerate. Its core competence lies in high-stakes, all-India functions requiring abstraction, foresight, and strategic coordination. The delivery of local public goods - water, sanitation, housing, education, or primary health - demands granular knowledge, operational agility, and community engagement - competencies the Union does not possess. When it intrudes into these domains, it diverts scarce executive attention from national priorities. Every hour spent reviewing a rural housing scheme is an hour not devoted to cyber warfare. This is not merely inefficient; it is a strategic misallocation.
Classical management theory provides a final caution. VA Graicunas and Lyndall Urwick established a hard limit to how many subordinates or complex activities an executive can effectively supervise. While subordinates increase arithmetically, managerial complexity grows exponentially because of direct, cross, and group relationships. Adding a fifth subordinate, for instance, increases numbers by 20% but amplifies relational complexity by nearly 100%. Once the span of control is exceeded, governance collapses into information overload and decision paralysis.
By expanding the Concurrent List and proliferating Centrally Sponsored Schemes in State subjects, the Union has stretched its span of control across a subcontinent of 1.4 billion people far beyond cognitive limits. It has become a 'flabby giant - sluggish not because of incompetence, but because of congestion. Santhanam's warning thus remains decisive.
Strength does not arise from the accumulation of functions, but from disciplined refusal of responsibilities that do not belong at the national level. A government that tries to do everything ultimately does nothing well.
To be concluded
The author is retired IAS officer of Tamil Nadu cadre, and Member, High-Level Committee on Union-State Relations constituted by the Government of Tamil Nadu