Chandragupta Maurya, who ruled from the Mauryan Empire, was advised by Kautilya, the author of the Arthashastra (Science of Material Gain). This laid out the foundations of a centralised but hierarchically distributed government, with a strong focus on important issues such as administration. As a whole, the empire was made up of provinces, districts and villages, each of which was run by local officials, who carried out the functions that were delegated to them by the central administration. The king was the head of the executive, and he appointed the subordinate officials, including ministers and other officers of the administration. The council of ministers (the Mantri Parishad) advised the king on his decisions and helped to delegate them down to more junior officials of the administration. The number of ministers in the council of ministers varied, depending on events. Not all ministers were required to attend all meetings. Beneath the council of ministers was the civil service of the Mauryan Empire, who carried out the central executive, judicial and revenue offices in a highly efficient manner. Each department within the civil service was run by a superintendent (Adhyaksha). Two other types of officials were the Samaharta (the collectors of revenue) and the Sannidhata, who was the officer in charge of the administrative functioning of the treasury.
The part of the kingdom that was directly ruled by the king was made up of numerous provinces (Janapadas). Some of the capitals of the provinces were Taxila, Ujjain, Tosali, Suvarnagiri and Pataliputra. Each province was made up of numerous districts and each district was subdivided into smaller sub-districts. Some of the sub-districts were further subdivided with the village being the smallest possible sub-district of a sub-district. The governor of each province dealt with the daily administrative tasks relating specifically to that province, in association with those parts of the central administration that related specifically to the province. The governor was also assisted in this task by district officers, reporters and clerks who were assigned to the particular province in question.
The Mauryan municipal administrative system added further complexities to the situation. There is, for instance, a historical account of the administrative operation of the municipal board of Pataliputra. This was overseen by a board, which had 30 members. The board was subdivided into six committees. Each committee was made up of five members. Sometimes these committees would split up into smaller subcommittees, depending on what the purpose of the committee was and the administrative task it was to undertake. Collectively the board and the committees ran the administration of the city. The main areas the committees oversaw were industry, citizens, registration, trade and commerce, manufacturing and the administrative collection of excise duties and custom duties.
There were numerous sources of revenue for the state, each of which required a range of specific administrative tasks. Land revenue was one important source of revenue. There were also duties on a variety of commodities and trades, for instance, forestry, water, mining and the creation of currency. The revenue was used to fund a variety of branches of the state, including the military, the officials, public projects, public construction and the administrative bureaucracy that undertook each of these tasks. These included excise duty, forest taxes, water taxes, mines and coinage. Much of the state revenue was used for paying the army or the officials of the royal government, or was spent on charities and on different public works like irrigation projects and road construction. In the reign of Ashoka, further reforms were applied, for instance, to the methods of administration, as well as to the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the administrative bureaucracy. There was also a new class of officers created: the Dhamma Mahamatras.