Question by Many Readers: “where i can get iipa journals for public administration(either online OR book format)”

Ans. IJPA: Indian journal of Public Administration.
IIPA (Indian institution of Public Administration) publishes ^this journal every three months. You can’t find its journal online, you’ve to subscribe to it manually. But it is quite unnecessary. Let me tell you why:

What utility does IJPA serve?

  • In Government library, I’ve seen multiple volumes of this IJPA. Most of the time it’s just ‘case-study’ with numbers, Management theory, and academic stuff of what kind of contemporary research is going on, in India and abroad.
  • The points you can quote in your mains answers, or the topics you need to study for Public Administration syllabus : well they rarely appear in that journal.
  • If you’re reading Yojana, Kurukshetra and newspapers regularly, you’ll get more than enough points and examples to cite in any Public Administration questions.
  • Now consider this: IIPA releases the journal every 3 months, even if you subscribe right now, you’ll get at most 2 or 3 issues before the mains. So, What’s the probability of you getting some decent exam-oriented stuff from just 2-3 issues. You might wanna go in library Archives and refer to all IJPA issues of last 3-4 years. But what’s the point in doing overkill? You don’t have to do Ph.D. here.

So, if this journal is unnecessary,

why IJPA has crept into the ‘recommend booklist’

 

  1. Outdated articles written by coaching class experts, still in google-ranking. When a newcomer searches for recommend booklist, he/she gets this IJPA, same reason Mishra Puri, Dutt Sundaram for economy= unnecessary overkill.
  2.  Topper interviews.You see, while giving interviews to magz, some toppers have
    mis-tendency to list a truckload of reference-books even if they didnot
    read it by themselves. They think people will respect them less if they didnot mention
    lot of books!

But Anay Dwivedi is one of the rare-gems, a UPSC topper with Public Administration optional subject-here is what he said in his own blog: (copy pasting)

i didnt read iipa journals as the info i had frm newspapers was more
than enough for writing my answers…i didnt have the time to go thru
them..so it is not necessary tht u must go thru ijpa to score well in
pub ad…

 

Instead of reading three books once, read one book thrice