‘Lateral’ Entry Won’t
Fix Basic Govt Glitches
Jawhar Sircar
Asian Age &
Deccan Chronicle
19 June 2018
Prime Minister
Narendra Modi has mastered the art of utilising insecurity as an instrument of
his state policy and needs to demonstrate this at frequent intervals. Or else,
when he has better things to do -- and rather quickly, as time is running out —
he has decided to rattle the complacent and over-secure babudom of New Delhi.
That may explain his intention to recruit 10 new “professionals”
— the definition of “professionals” has been kept
delightfully vague — for lateral entry as joint secretaries in the Central
government. The media decided almost immediately that the Indian Administrative
Service was threatened because few in it really distinguish between different
species of bureaucrats and could not care less if the incumbent came from the
IAS or from the Indian Posts and Telegraph Accounts and Finance Service. To
most people, they appear equally obnoxious or are avoidable — unless a scoop or
a soundbite becomes imperative. Besides, not many people know that the earlier
predominance of IAS officers at the level of joint secretaries — the real
cutting edge of Bharat Sarkar — has long gone, partly because other services
have to be accommodated and partly because the states are unwilling to let
their best secretaries go to the Centre. Leading the latter brigade for over a
decade was Mr Modi himself, when he was chief minister of Gujarat.
Serving officers
survive New Delhi’s corridors of power on the age-old aphorism “every man for
himself and the devil take the hindmost”. But the Opposition cried foul and not
without reason, for they simply do not trust an over-controlling Prime Minister
who has never disguised his scorn for them. They suspect this to be yet another
attempt to “saffronise” the administration through the backdoor
entry, to bypass the Constitution and the Union Public Service Commission
(UPSC). This fear is not unreal as the advertisement issued by the department
of personnel and training does not mention the UPSC anywhere, and under Article
320 of the Constitution, recruitment to senior posts in notified services — Central
or all-India — has necessarily to be done in consultation with the UPSC. The PM
may have vetted his idea with legal experts but by being miserly with details,
or just imperious, the government could always claim that it never had any
intention to circumvent the constitutional provisions.
The UPSC has three
standard and time-tested methods of recruitment — namely, by conducting
examinations for selecting directly from the open market; or by promoting to
higher posts those who are already in service after rigorous screening; and
finally, by transferring incumbents from one post to the other within the
government setup. The current proposal to induct 10 “professionals”
would fall in the first category, and it would be most appropriate if the UPSC
is entrusted with a mandate to select applicants on a fast-track mode. This is
quite possible and feasible and in its seven decades of working experience, the
commission has gone through a lot of such exercises. It may conduct special
examinations to be fair to all applicants or it could just interview them,
which is a bit subjective and thus open to criticism. Or it could do both — but
the entire process does call for a bit of time and may spill over beyond May
2019, when a freshly-elected government would have to be installed. As a
quintessentially stodgy and stable body, the UPSC detests being rushed around
and there are instances when posts can take several years to get filled, for
various reasons. A government in a hurry — that did not utilise the earlier
four years which it had to test such flashes of inspiration — may not be
terribly enthused by the slow and steady modus of the UPSC. No one really
knows, and a lot may depend on how the wind blows.
Coming to more
relevant issues, just 10 new entrants can hardly shake up or devastate the
level of joint secretaries in the Central government. The total number is
around 470, though this keeps changing as posts are “upgraded” or “kept in
abeyance” at times. But then, it could also be the thin edge of the wedge. It
is clear that Prime Minister Modi is simply taking advantage of the undisguised
and widespread frustration at the failure of the IAS and the rest of the
bureaucracy to be more receptive, less obstructive and to deliver at the speed
that the 21st century demands. But colonial procedures and the clogging need to
tackled at Gangotri, not at Ganga Sagar. If we assume that the highly
competitive UPSC examinations still select the best possible candidates each
year, we need to examine what happens thereafter. All those who qualify can
surely not become pompous, insensitive, slothy or corrupt overnight, unless the
system demands it and traumatises them into such undesirable conduct. Every
government since Independence — including this most hyped one — has simply
permitted the political class to ride roughshod over the system and only
unabashedly user-friendly babus could ever make it anywhere. The vast majority
was simply numbed into compliance as each incoming government had “massive programmes”
to deliver that they had promised their voters and no one really has ever had
the time to discuss problems relating to the engine.
Each incoming
government had its own blue-eyed boys who came from the same caste, community,
district or “ideology” and the really skilful could swiftly adapt to each new
minister. The show thus went on. There is, for instance, no reason why Mr Modi
could not introduce the system of “pensioning off” large numbers at each stage
of promotion, as is done in the armed forces. One had expected the mass-scale
slaughter of corrupt officers after his 2014 mandate, but nothing spectacular
happened. Constrictive rules could have been slashed mercilessly in four years,
but this was not seen as a priority task. More energy was spent on gimmickry
and in playing around with alphabets like kindergarten kids to find new
acronyms for recycled schemes. The professional specialisation of IAS officers
was never encouraged as Mr Modi’s own tightly-controlled DoPT forced
highly-qualified engineers, management graduates and other university toppers
(who constitute the bulk of the IAS) to move from atomic energy to gobar gas.
Besides, this government will be remembered not only for the chilling fear that
it has spread amongst terribly insecure babus (for no productive reason), but
also as one where imaginative and innovative officers were hardly rewarded — but
the sycophants prospered, as never before.
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