The administrators or public servants are known as bureaucrats, and collectively as bureaucracy. If government is the head of the public administration, bureaucracy is its heart Nevertheless, die term ‘bureaucracy1 has come into use in modem times, because of the increasing functions and importance of the role of the public servants in the modem State. A.L.Lowell, writing during the First World War (1914-1918), said that fifty years ago “the public was not aware of civil servants.” One reason was that the number of die bureaucrats was very small.
It is only in the modem times that they have burgeoned into millions, which is a proof of the immense increase in the functions of the modem government Indeed, bureaucracy is a body of men who mediate between the rulers and the ruled. It is the “sarkar” or the sovereign in the eyes of the common people. If public administration determines whether a government is good or bad, the bureaucracy determines whether an administration would be good or not.
Max Weber, the German Sociologist was the first thinker to study the role and place of bureaucracy in the modem State and society. He said that when a society becomes economically and technically advanced, it inevitably develops sooner or later a bureaucratic structure of administration. It has three characteristics, viz., professionalism, hierarchy and rigidity.
These characteristics are also the sources of its defects. For instance, “it is an inevitable defect, that bureaucrats will care more for routine than for results.” This is the cause of bureaucratic red tapism, bossism and paperwork. In die developing countries of the Third World, bureaucratic systems suffer from corruption, nepotism favouritism and such other shortcomings. This is the reason why the term bureaucracy is sometimes used in a pejorative sense.