Essay on There Are Better Practices to Best Practices

“There are better practices to best practices” appeared as Topic 8 of Section B in the UPSC Civil Services Mains Essay paper held on 7 January 2022. Eight words on a question paper. One hundred and twenty-five marks if you handle it well. A wasted hour if you do not. This guide breaks the topic down the way it should be tackled in the hall — first the meaning, then the angles, then the time map, then the paragraph-by-paragraph plan, and finally a complete 1,200-word model essay you can study, dissect and adapt.

When this was asked and what UPSC is really testing

The topic was set in UPSC CSE Mains 2021, Essay paper, Section B. Three hours, two essays, one from each section, roughly 1,000 to 1,200 words each, 125 marks per essay. “There are better practices to ‘best practices'” is a philosophical-pragmatic prompt that hides a sharp test. The phrase “best practices” comes from management consulting and policy circles; the question is whether you can see through the slogan, name what is wrong with it, and offer a wiser stance — without becoming dismissive of standards.

UPSC is checking four things at once. One, can you read a clever, almost paradoxical title without being charmed by it, and convert it into a clear thesis. Two, can you anchor an abstract claim in concrete examples — from governance, technology, history and your own country. Three, can you handle a counter-current honestly, conceding that some “best practices” are best for genuine reasons. Four, can you write 1,200 disciplined words that examine the slogan instead of attacking a strawman. The aspirant who handles all four scores in the 130s. The aspirant who handles only the fourth — clean prose with no spine — scores in the 90s.

Five angles that unlock “There are better practices to best practices”

The trap with a clever quote is to attack it from one side and ride that attack for 1,200 words. The mark-pulling answer instead identifies several lenses, names them clearly, and weaves them. Here are the five most defensible readings of the topic. You do not need all five in your essay — three, treated well, is the sweet spot. But you should know all five so your choice is conscious.

1. Best practice as a marketing label — most “best practices” are codified by consultants, ranked at Davos, sold in glossy reports. The label hides whose interests defined “best” and what was filtered out. Used well, this opens up benchmarking culture, McKinsey-style templates, and the SOP-isation of public administration.
2. Isomorphism — the copycat trap — DiMaggio and Powell’s idea that organisations imitate each other for legitimacy rather than effectiveness. The angle here is structural: when every state government adopts the same dashboard, the same KPI, the same “smart” plan, “best” becomes a uniform, not a standard.
3. Context as the missing variable — a practice that is best in Copenhagen is rarely best in Cuttack. Structural adjustment programmes were the “best practice” of the 1980s and broke many economies. The angle answers a sharp question: best for whom, where, when and at what cost.
4. Frugal innovation — when better beats best — Mangalyaan at roughly a tenth of NASA’s MAVEN cost; UPI leapfrogging Western card-rails; ASHA workers as community-health innovation; ITC e-Choupal; the JAM trinity. India is full of cases where a contextual “better” outperformed an imported “best”.
5. The counter — sometimes best really is best — basic surgical hygiene, aviation safety protocols, double-entry accounting, vaccination cold chains. Not every imported standard is colonialism in a suit. The angle rescues the essay from cleverness and lands it in nuance.

A strong essay picks angles 1, 3 and 4 as its backbone (the label, the context, the Indian frugal cases), uses 2 as a structural diagnosis (isomorphism) and 5 as a counter-current. That gives the essay rhythm — diagnosis, complication, resolution — instead of a single long complaint.

A time map for the 1,500-second window

One essay deserves about 75 to 90 minutes inside the three-hour paper. Spending more on Essay 1 starves Essay 2. The single biggest source of below-100 essay scores is poor time discipline — beautiful introductions, panicked conclusions. Use a rough breakdown like this:

Notice what is not on the list: rewriting the introduction halfway, hunting for the perfect quote, fancy diagrams, decorative underlining. None of that earns marks. Discipline does.

What to add — and what to avoid at all costs

The essay paper rewards what most aspirants under-do and punishes what most aspirants over-do. Memorise this list before you walk into the hall.

Add liberally

• One precise thesis, stated by the end of paragraph two and not abandoned. “A ‘best practice’ is a useful starting point and a dangerous finishing point; the wiser stance is to learn the principle and adapt the practice.”
• Concrete examples across three or four domains — one global policy failure (1980s structural adjustment), one Indian frugal-innovation case (Mangalyaan, UPI, ASHA, Mid-Day Meal), one institutional design (NITI Aayog’s district-level experimentation, behavioural insights units) and one historical or literary anchor (Gandhi’s rejection of imported industrial templates, Chanakya’s contextual statecraft).
• Two or three short, named ideas — DiMaggio and Powell on isomorphism, Nassim Taleb on anti-fragility, the Gandhian principle of Swadeshi. One per major section is enough.
• One Indian philosophical anchor. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam read carefully — the world is a family, not a single template; the Bhagavad Gita’s swadharma, the duty proper to one’s own context; or Tagore’s warning against imported moulds.
• Counter-arguments handled briefly. “It might be argued that some best practices — hygiene, aviation safety — really are universally best…” — then resolved in two lines. Acknowledging the other side earns more marks than ignoring it.
• A clean conclusion that returns to the opening image — not a fresh argument, not a new example.

Avoid — even when tempted

• Restating the topic in the first sentence. “There are indeed better practices to best practices…” signals that you have nothing to add. Open with an image — a workshop wall, a consultant’s slide, a village kitchen.
• Drifting into a single domain. A 1,200-word essay only on UPI, or only on structural adjustment, looks like a GS answer. Range matters.
• Unsourced statistics. “75% of best practices fail abroad” — if you cannot name the source, do not write the number. Examiners cross-mark this.
• Naming current politicians or parties. The Essay paper is graded by humans across the ideological spectrum. Naming current leaders introduces avoidable risk. Use the institution — NITI Aayog, RBI, ISRO, the Election Commission — not the personality.
• Becoming anti-foreign. The topic is not “imported is bad”. Citing Mangalyaan should not slip into chest-thumping. The argument is about context, not chauvinism.
• Moralising. “We must reject best practices and embrace our own ways” reads like a school speech. The essay paper rewards examination, not exhortation.

A paragraph-by-paragraph blueprint

Twelve paragraphs at roughly 100 words each gets you to 1,200. Thirteen at 90 each gets you the same. What follows is a 13-paragraph plan that maps cleanly onto the model essay below. Each line is what that paragraph is doing, not what it is saying.

1. Opening image — a consultant’s slide deck or a village artisan’s workbench. No mention of the topic yet.
2. The pivot to thesis — name the topic, then state the thesis in one sentence.
3. Define the terms — what does “best practice” mean (codified, ranked, exportable), what does “better practice” promise (contextual, adaptive, evolving).
4. Angle 1 — The marketing label — Davos, consulting decks, league tables. Who decides what is “best”.
5. Diagnosis — Isomorphism — DiMaggio and Powell. Why organisations copy each other for legitimacy rather than results.
6. History’s warning — Structural adjustment — the 1980s template that broke many economies. A coloured “best” collapsing on contact with context.
7. Indian anchor — Gandhi on Swadeshi, the Gita’s swadharma, Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam read carefully — one family, many practices.
8. Indian evidence — Frugal innovation — Mangalyaan, UPI, JAM trinity, ASHA workers, Mid-Day Meal scheme inspiring other countries.
9. Institutional design — Experimentation — NITI Aayog’s Aspirational Districts approach, behavioural insights units, MGNREGA’s local-design clauses.
10. Counter-argument handled — yes, some best practices are best for good reasons. Hygiene, aviation safety, vaccination cold chains. Not every local hack is wisdom.
11. The wiser stance — Principles over postures — learn from the shoulders, do not copy the posture; Taleb’s anti-fragility as a frame.
12. Way forward — Institutional — context-first policy design, evidence units, frugal-engineering institutes, sunset clauses on imported templates.
13. Closing image — return to the workbench. End with one resonant line that re-states the topic.

How to make an examiner stop and read

An essay examiner reads several hundred scripts in a sitting. The first paragraph decides whether they read the second with attention or with autopilot. Four small habits separate the essays that get attention from the ones that get skimmed.

• Open with a scene, not a statement. A wall of carpenter’s tools, a Davos panel, a village kitchen, a launch-pad in Sriharikota. Concrete images cost no marks and earn attention.
• Use the topic phrase itself two or three times across the essay. Once in the thesis, once at the turn, once at the close. It signals discipline and prevents drift.
• Vary sentence length. A short sentence after three long ones lands. Examiners feel rhythm before they parse meaning.
• End paragraphs with the takeaway, not with examples. Place the example mid-paragraph. Let the last sentence be the thought, so the reader carries it into the next paragraph.

The complete essay — “There are better practices to ‘best practices'”

What follows is a 1,200-word model essay built on the blueprint above. Read it twice — once for the argument, once for the moves. The moves are what you can carry into your own essay; the argument is one of many you could make.

On a wall in a small workshop in Moradabad hang forty-seven hand tools, each shaped slightly differently from the next. A chisel for soft brass; a different chisel for the harder alloy that came in last week; a hammer with a rounded face for embossing, another with a flat face for setting. The master craftsman who arranged them did not consult a manual. He laid out his tools by problem, not by category. Somewhere in a Mumbai boardroom that same week, a consulting deck recommended a single “best practice” workflow for forty-seven factories nationwide, regardless of what each one made. Both wall and deck claim to organise work. Only one respects the work being done.

“There are better practices to ‘best practices'” is the craftsman’s quiet rebuttal to the consultant’s deck. The phrase is at once playful and pointed. It does not deny that good practices exist or that standards matter. It denies the article — the definite “the” — buried inside the slogan “the best practice”. The thesis of any serious essay on this topic is therefore narrow and defensible: a codified best practice is a useful starting point and a dangerous finishing point, and the wiser stance is to learn the underlying principle and adapt the practice to the place where it must live.

Some definitions help. A “best practice” usually means a method that worked somewhere, was studied, codified, ranked and exported. A “better practice” fits the place where it is used, evolves with feedback, and is honest about what it does not yet know. The first is a noun; the second is a verb. The first claims to be finished; the second knows it is not.

The phrase “best practice” has a marketing history that is rarely acknowledged. It travels with consulting decks, league tables, and the brisk slideware of global summits. Someone decides what counts as “best”; someone decides which case studies are included and which are filtered out. The label sounds neutral; the selection rarely is. When forty governments adopt the same dashboard, the same KPIs, the same procurement template, the question is not whether the dashboard is good. It is who designed the criteria for “best”, and what kinds of success they were able to imagine.

The sociologists Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell gave this pattern a name in 1983 — institutional isomorphism. Organisations, they argued, do not copy each other primarily because copying works; they copy because copying confers legitimacy. A municipal corporation that adopts the same smart-city template as forty others is harder to criticise than one that designs its own. The price of that legitimacy is that the practice is now optimised for the centre that defined it, not for the city implementing it. “Best” becomes a uniform, not a standard.

History supplies the clearest warning. In the 1980s, the structural adjustment programmes recommended to dozens of developing economies were sold as the global best practice of the moment — fiscal contraction, rapid liberalisation, withdrawal of subsidies in a fixed sequence. The package had worked in some places. Applied without adaptation, it produced lost decades in much of Africa and Latin America, and its lessons were absorbed only slowly. The same template, in a different soil, ceased to be best. It was not even better. It was simply wrong for that ground.

India’s intellectual inheritance was, in this respect, more careful than the consulting age it now lives inside. The Bhagavad Gita’s idea of swadharma — the duty proper to one’s own situation — is precisely a warning against borrowed templates: it is better to do one’s own duty imperfectly than another’s perfectly. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, often quoted to mean “the world is one family”, carries a quieter second meaning when read in full — one family with many practices, not one family with one practice. Gandhi’s Swadeshi was not a tariff policy; it was the older claim that imported industrial templates would not fit a village economy without breaking it.

India’s recent record of frugal innovation makes the abstract claim concrete. ISRO’s Mars Orbiter Mission reached Mars at roughly a tenth of the cost of comparable foreign missions, by redesigning the mission profile rather than copying it. UPI built a real-time payments rail that several richer economies now study, by leapfrogging the card networks. The JAM trinity — Aadhaar, Jan Dhan, mobile telephony — solved a financial-inclusion problem that legacy banking practice had failed to solve in seventy years. ASHA workers turned community trust into a public-health asset. The Mid-Day Meal scheme, born of school-level pragmatism in Tamil Nadu, is now studied by other countries as a model in its own right. Each is a “better practice” arrived at by ignoring the imported “best”.

Institutional design is beginning to catch up. NITI Aayog’s Aspirational Districts programme deliberately runs 112 parallel experiments rather than imposing one national template. Behavioural insights units test interventions before scaling them. MGNREGA’s design vests muster-roll and works-list decisions in the gram sabha, so the implementation can vary with the village. None is a finished system. All treat “best practice” as a draft and not a destination.

It must be conceded — and this is where many essays on this topic go wrong — that some best practices are best for genuinely universal reasons. The surgeon’s checklist for handwashing saves lives whether the operating theatre is in Geneva or Guwahati. Aviation safety protocols do not become more contextual when an aircraft crosses the Tropic of Cancer. Double-entry bookkeeping, double-blind clinical trials, vaccination cold chains — these are not consulting fashions, and the case against “best practice” must not slip into a case against standards. The argument is narrower and sharper: when context matters, context wins, and most domains turn out to be more context-laden than the slogan admits.

The wiser stance, then, is not to reject best practices but to use them properly. Stand on the shoulders of those who came before; do not copy their postures. Read the case study for the principle, not the prescription. Nassim Taleb’s distinction between fragile, robust and anti-fragile systems is useful here: a system that locks in one best practice is fragile to change, a system that tolerates many practices is robust, and a system that learns from each local experiment is anti-fragile. The job of public administration in a country of India’s scale is the third.

What follows from this for policy is concrete and not romantic. Treat every imported template as a hypothesis with a sunset clause. Build evidence units inside ministries to test before scaling. Pilot in districts before legislating in capitals. Publish failures alongside successes so the next round can learn. Reserve the phrase “best practice” for the narrow domains where context truly does not matter, and replace it elsewhere with “current best understanding” — less marketable, more honest.

Return for a moment to the workshop in Moradabad. The forty-seven tools are not a denial of craftsmanship; they are its highest expression. Each was once somebody’s “best” — for a brass thinner than this one, for a hammer-stroke softer than that. The craftsman keeps them all because tomorrow’s metal may not be today’s. A republic that wants to keep learning must hold its tools the same way. There are, finally, better practices to “best practices”, and the better practice is to never stop looking for them.

Word count: approximately 1,200.

How to use this model essay

Do not memorise it. Memorised essays read like memorised essays, and examiners spot them in two paragraphs. Use the model the way a chess student uses a master game: study the opening image, the pivot, the way each paragraph hands the reader to the next, the placement of the Indian anchor, the way the counter-argument is brought up and then closed. Then take a different essay topic — try “Innovation is the calling card of the future” or “The process of self-discovery has now been technologically outsourced” — and write your own essay using the same blueprint. Repeat that exercise eight to ten times and the structure becomes muscle memory. On the day of the exam, the only thing you should have to think about is the topic itself.

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