Indian Administration III: Planning — the Planning Commission, NDC, NITI Aayog and State Planning Boards; the Judiciary — Independence, Judicial Review, PIL and Reform; Police Administration and Reform; E-Governance Initiatives

India has a single integrated judiciary with the Supreme Court (Article 124) at the apex, High Courts in the states (Article 214) and subordinate courts below. The Constitution secures judicial independence by several devices: judges can be removed only by an address of both houses of Parliament passed by a special majority on grounds of proved misbehaviour or incapacity (Article 124(4)); their salaries are charged on the Consolidated Fund and cannot be reduced to their disadvantage during their term; the conduct of judges cannot be discussed in Parliament except on a removal motion (Article 121); the courts have the power to punish for contempt (Articles 129 and 215); retired Supreme Court judges may not plead before any court in India; and Article 50 directs the separation of the judiciary from the executive in public services. On appointments, the Supreme Court in the Second Judges case (1993) and the Third Judges case (1998) created the collegium of the Chief Justice and senior judges, and in the Fourth Judges case (2015) struck down the 99th Amendment and the National Judicial Appointments Commission.

Judicial review — the power to declare legislative and executive acts void if they violate the Constitution — rests on Articles 13, 32 and 226, and the basic structure doctrine of Kesavananda Bharati (1973) extends it to constitutional amendments. For administration, review means that officials' decisions can be quashed for illegality, irrationality or procedural unfairness. Public interest litigation, developed from the late 1970s by Justices P. N. Bhagwati and V. R. Krishna Iyer, relaxed the rule of locus standi so that any public-spirited person could approach the court on behalf of those unable to do so — Hussainara Khatoon (1979) on undertrial prisoners, S. P. Gupta (1981, the First Judges case) on standing — and admitted even letters as petitions (epistolary jurisdiction). PIL has produced landmark administrative directions (on bonded labour, the environment, custodial violence, the right to food), but is criticised for judicial overreach into executive and policy matters and for frivolous petitions.

• Pendency: tens of millions of cases pending, above all in the subordinate courts — the central problem of judicial administration, tracked through the National Judicial Data Grid.
• Technology: the e-Courts project (from 2007) for computerisation, e-filing and virtual hearings.
• Alternative dispute resolution: Lok Adalats under the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987; mediation and arbitration; Gram Nyayalayas under the Gram Nyayalayas Act, 2008.
• Structural proposals: an All India Judicial Service (enabled by the 42nd Amendment's change to Article 312 but never created), more judges per million people, and fast-track courts.

Police and public order are in the State List (Entries 1 and 2), so police administration is a state function, though the Union maintains the central armed police forces and intelligence agencies. The basic law was for over a century the colonial Police Act, 1861, which created a force designed for control rather than service, under the "dual control" of the district's Superintendent of Police and the District Magistrate. In large cities many states have adopted the commissionerate system, in which a Commissioner of Police exercises magisterial powers of licensing and preventive action directly. The criminal-law framework changed on 1 July 2024, when the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam (all of 2023) replaced the Indian Penal Code, the Code of Criminal Procedure and the Indian Evidence Act.

The major reform milestones are the National Police Commission (1977–81, chaired by Dharma Vira), whose eight reports proposed a State Security Commission, a fixed tenure for police chiefs and insulation from political interference; the Ribeiro Committee (1998) and the Padmanabhaiah Committee (2000); the Model Police Act, 2006 drafted by the Soli Sorabjee Committee; and the Supreme Court's judgment in Prakash Singh v. Union of India (2006), which issued seven directives. Compliance by states has been partial, and the Second ARC's fifth report, Public Order (2007), returned to the same agenda.

E-governance in India began with computerisation — the National Informatics Centre (1976) — and a wave of state-level pilots around 2000: Bhoomi, the computerisation of land records in Karnataka; e-Seva citizen service centres in Andhra Pradesh; Gyandoot, village information kiosks in Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh; and FRIENDS, single-window bill payment in Kerala. The National e-Governance Plan (2006) scaled these up through Mission Mode Projects at the Union, state and integrated levels, supported by common infrastructure — State Wide Area Networks, State Data Centres and Common Service Centres in villages.

Digital India (launched 1 July 2015) reframed the effort around digital infrastructure as a utility, governance and services on demand, and digital empowerment, with NeGP 2.0 as e-Kranti. Its building blocks — often called digital public infrastructure — are Aadhaar (the unique identity administered by the Unique Identification Authority of India; statutory under the Aadhaar Act, 2016, and upheld with limits in Justice K. S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, 2018), DigiLocker for documents, UMANG as a single mobile app for services, the Unified Payments Interface, Direct Benefit Transfer (from 2013) through the JAM trinity of Jan Dhan accounts, Aadhaar and mobile numbers, the Government e-Marketplace (2016) for public procurement, and CPGRAMS for public grievances. The administrative gains are reduced leakage, speed and transparency; the concerns are exclusion of those without connectivity or with failed biometric authentication, data protection, and the digital divide — questions taken up again under governance in Unit IX.