Subservience, Not Efficiency:
The Prime Minister & Civil Service
'Reforms’
Jawhar Sircar
In
2014, when Narendra Modi became Prime Minister he could have — and should have —
pushed through urgently-required structural reforms to improve India’s conservative
bureaucracy[1]. He had an unprecedented mandate for it and
had charmed voters into believing that he would cleanse Indian governance as
none before him ever had[2]. In reality, however, he appeared quite
comfortable with the creaky bureaucratic apparatus that he had inherited, for
he had assumed that his first-hand experience in running it at the state
level for over a dozen years
would suffice. But the fact is that the two sets of administration in our
federal set-up, the central and the state are actually as different as chalk is from cheese[3]. This is not only in terms of scale or the
number that a control freak can command — but what distinguishes the two
bureaucracies are their totally different world-views and consequentially,
their approaches to governance. In a state, a CM can operate through his
bureaucrats, who swear personal loyalty to him or her rather than to democracy,
and may do wonders[4]— though many of these Gujarat myths[5] are now being busted on closer scrutiny[6].
But this personal fiefdom model clearly does not work in the national
capital of 1.35 billion people. In a rather impersonal Delhi, systems matter
more than rustic loyalties and experience counts, not just genuflecting. Mr
Modi is finally realising this now — after his disastrous botch-up with
demonetisation, the several hit-wickets over GST and his failure to move the
economy upwards even when blessed with the lowest-ever petroleum prices. This
partly explains why he has chosen the last of his very secure five year term to
tinker around with the bureaucracy. This
means that after four years of relative peace, the Indian Administrative
Service (IAS) in particular and the civil services in general are suddenly
being targeted for overhauling. Not a week passes without some bright idea
being floated or an order being issued. A spate of recent announcements,
however, call for a closer look and the moot point is : will these usher in
revolutionary improvements in the functioning of either bureaucracy or
democracy or will the proposed measures help consolidate the iron grip of one
person or a party?
But why did Mr Modi decide to lean so
heavily on the bureaucracy from the day he took over as Prime Minister? The
reply is simple — he needed a set of people to could carry out his commands
without question. The Secretaries to the Government of India were his
points-persons, and cabinet ministers were told this quite unambiguously. For widely
differing reasons, he behaved as if his ministers, save a couple of lucky
exceptions, were hardly worth relying upon. This is not a sweeping generalisation:
I can cite many instances to
substantiate this observation, from my experiences when running a mammoth
public institution like Prasar Bharati for two and half years in
Mr Modi’s regime. For example, the
sudden and unwarranted decision in October 2104 to permit the controversial RSS
supremo to misuse Doordarshan to broadcast his traditional Dushera Day speech
to his cadres was taken obviously by the PM himself[7] No one was consulted in
an ‘autonomous organisation’ and it was thrust upon all — including a
protesting CEO of the pubic broadcaster. The minister appeared to have been
left out of the loop and incidentally, this is the same decent gentleman who
was ordered by PMO to return home and change from the jeans he was wearing — to
some more appropriate dress, before boarding his plane for his foreign tour. It
was made clear to everyone in Delhi that Mr Modi’s ministers were not
his colleagues — they were his subordinates. He was much more than primus inter
pares or first among equals. After all, it was he who had ensured that his
party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), almost single-handedly, won an
absolute majority in Parliament. In one sweeping order, he abolished the
68 Groups Of Ministers (GOMs) though which the previous NDA government operated
— deciding all inter-ministerial issues and problems through consensus. It
signalled that the PM would take the call after consulting the secretary of the
ministries and if rarely required, the ministers.
In a theatrical gesture, he kissed the
(hopefully disinfected) steps of Parliament for countless cameras to capture
the moment when he entered its portals for the first time, but none of his
subsequent actions revealed any fondness for parliamentary democracy. Not
surprisingly, Mr Modi’s cohorts took their cue
from him and sang the virtues of the American presidential system. The
hyper-communicative PM chose not to be present in Parliament most of the time
and when he did attend, he sat scowling — without participating in the debates.
But more important is the fact that even though he wielded enormous,
unprecedented powers, Narendra Modi did not utilise them to dismantle obnoxious
parts and abolish the feudal habits of the bureaucracy. After all, the same
machinery had served avaricious post-Mughal rulers in their ruthless
exploitation and more or less the same bureaucracy was taken over by Warren
Hastings and Cornwallis in the latter half of the 18th century, once they
snatched the reins of power.
The colonial duo, in
turn, did
sprinkle a few white men on the top but they also twisted this feudal
bureaucracy for their own purposes of extortion and repression
as
also to facilitate their own unjust enrichment. The new ‘nabobs’, as the British overlords were called, set up hundreds of ‘circuit houses’
to hold peripatetic revenue courts (on their ‘circuits’) in
the interior and built countless inspection bungalows to strengthen their
control and bring rural India to heel. Mr Modi, on his part, had the best
opportunity of surgically aborting a lot of vile formations within this
colossal pyramid — but he chose not to, or perhaps did not find time between
his excessive but ineffective foreign tours and endless political lectures and
campaigns, when in India. Instead, he used technology to seek explanations
directly from District Magistrates in this ‘federal polity’, bypassing the constitutionally approved layers. This reveals a
control freak who cares little for the spirit of federalism that the
constitution enshrines. Over the next few months, it became increasingly clear
that he was an unabashed centraliser who did not believe in ‘cooperative
federalism’, which was one of the many catchy phrases he popularised, only for
effect.
Indeed, his centralising[8] of all decisions,
postings and transfers was not only unprecedented, but it resulted in impasses
and deadlocks. Critical posts of heads of national-level institutions were kept
vacant for several months and years — even as they went to seed — and all
important boards and committees took even longer to fill up. Decisions had to
await his personal attention but he was forever roaming all over — bestowing
embarrassing bear-hugs on every foreign leader he met. He did introduce a new
and subjective ‘360 degree
assessment system’, but this was to
ensure that those he did not want were not promoted as Secretaries or
Additional Secretaries. Mr Modi also brandished a weapon called ‘repatriation’ that had been used very rarely in the past.
In the last four years, more IAS, IPS and Central service
officers have been sent back to their states or cadres from the central
government than in the preceding four decades put together. Cabinet reshuffles have been infrequent, but
reshuffling of Secretaries, Additional Secretaries and Joint Secretaries are so regular and unpredictable that it has started to
demoralise the bureaucracy. But these terror tactics do not qualify as
structural changes.
On its part, the bureaucracy soon
mastered the art of survival. Many bent backwards, in contorted yoga postures,
to applaud every ‘scheme’ that the leader announced.
Most of these schemes were just rehashes of earlier or existing schemes,
renamed with much fanfare by the Prime Minister and his coterie. Total personal
loyalty and unusual subordination could just not ensure efficiency and
delivery. No advice was either sought from (or given by) ‘professional administrators’
who
had spent a lifetime in drafting and implementing complex schemes and projects. Else,
an administrative disaster like the demonetisation of currency notes could not
have either been conceived or rammed through. It also explains why no senior
official was held responsible for this Himalayan blunder. Mr Modi and his
protege from Gujarat, Finance Secretary Hasmukh Adhia, decided everything in
total secrecy. The chatteratti of Delhi spoke of how the Finance
Minister himself was not kept informed of details and the Banking Secretary was
never in the loop —which explains why the banks floundered for want of a
determined line of command. More recently, Arvind Subramaniam, the government’s senior most economist, submitted his
resignation to go back home to the US, just as Arvind Panagariya, the former
vice chairman of Niti Aayog, did a while back. But then, these economists have
already picked up enough materials to
write their best-seller books, even as they returned to their more lucrative
professorial assignments in the USA, to further leverage their rare first-hand
experiences beyond classrooms — obviously for economic benefits.
Challenging the UPSC’s method of selection
It is against this backdrop that the
Prime Minister’s proposal of May 20,
addressed to all the ministries, is alarming. It suggested that the Department of Personnel
and Training, which Mr Modi heads, should finally determine the fate of
candidates who successfully clear the extremely difficult civil services
examination conducted by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC). Mr Modi
wants the allocation of the three All India Services, the IAS, the Indian
Police Service and the Indian Forest Service as well as the 17 to 20 Central
Services to be done by the training institutes that successful civil service
candidates report to for the first 100 days, rather than the UPSC. Currently,
the UPSC uses its time-tested ‘rank cum option’ system to allocate the service for successful
candidates. But if the new system is enforced, a successful candidate who
qualifies for the three All India Services, where a ‘state cadre’ has also to be determined, will have his — or
her — fate determined by the training academies, not the UPSC alone. This is
even though the current system has worked well for seven decades. All
officer-trainees undergo their common training, known as the Foundation Course
(F.C.) at the training academies, of which the ‘mother’ training institute is the Lal Bahadur Shastri
National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA) in Mussoorie. Unfortunately, as the
LBSNAA can no longer accommodate all the successful candidates, who now number
around 1000 to 1200, some officer-trainees do their F.C. at new training
centres located in other cities. This is a pity because the F.C. period is the
only time civil servants from different services stay together and acquire
life-long friends, beyond their own service or cadre.
Apart from the fact that it is not clear
how these multiple training institutes will standardise their assessment grades
in just three months, what is causing concern is that successful candidates may
spend the entire F.C. period currying favour with their trainers to
ensure they move upwards to more coveted services or careers. Or that open
political jockeying will be the order of the day to help enterprising
candidates jump from the middle of the list to the top — as Mr Modi’s department will then matter more than the
UPSC. However, the Prime Minister’s ‘decision’ may not pass the test of
judicial scrutiny if it is carried out as Article 320 of the Indian
Constitution empowers only the UPSC to recommend and decide the postings of
officers to different services and state-cadres. But if this case goes to a ‘considerate bench’ in the Supreme Court, anything can happen.
Indira Gandhi bullied the judiciary and encouraged judges like AN Ray to crawl
and be rewarded. The key point, however, is that Mr Modi chose to impress
all civil servants once again that he is the boss, and he will decide their
fate and future, even if the first experiment is likely to be after the next
general elections.
For the last seventy years, the UPSC
has been following a very rigorous, transparent process, inviting applications
from some hundreds of thousands of aspirants. In 2016, some 11,35,943
candidates applied for the UPSC’s ‘Preliminary’ examination and 4,59,659 actually took the
examination. Only 15,445 were selected to take the next very tough series of ‘Final’
examinations.
After that, the UPSC constituted interview boards with highly qualified experts
— vice chancellors, retired civil servants, top scientists, army generals and
other specialists — to grill the cream of the candidates that emerged through
these two stages. In 2016, only 2961 were called for the interviews, and 1209
were finally recommended by the UPSC for appointment to the civil services.
Thus, only one out of every 940 aspirants made it to some service, with just
one out of every 4000 or so ‘general category’
aspirants
qualifying for the IAS. It is important to note that there are four categories
of ‘posts’
in
each service, reserved for the Scheduled Castes (SC),the Scheduled Tribes (ST),
the Other Backward Castes (OBC) and the residual ‘General’ lot.
The UPSC also scrutinises the ‘options’
submitted
by individual candidates for specific services of their choice, in terms of
vacancies available for each service under these four categories. For those who
opt for and also qualify for the three All India Services, there is the
additional option for the state cadres they prefer, and these choices have to
be done precisely in conjunction with the limited number of posts available
under each category (SC,ST, OBC, General) for each of the 23 services. Even the
UPSC does not claim that its system is perfect, but it has earned credibility
and is the best we can get. The fact that the UPSC selected less than 200 for
the IAS and the Indian Foreign Service out of the 4.6 lakh aspirants who
appeared for the preliminary examination does not mean they are ‘superior’ — it just means that they scored better in a specific set of
tests.
The lateral entry Joint
Secretaries
The second ‘bouncer’ was lobbed on 19th of June —that 10 ‘professionals’ would be inducted from the
open market at the ‘cutting edge’ level of Joint Secretaries in the central
government. By declaring these 10 posts to be contractual in nature and not on
the permanent rolls, government conveyed its intention to bypass the constitutionally
laid down imperative of getting the selection done only by the UPSC. Earlier
governments had brought in professionals from outside like Manmohan Singh,
Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Vijay Kelkar and Jairam Ramesh, but without such
fanfare. They were all highly qualified individuals with impressive educational
and work experience, and, in any case, the post of “Chief Economic Advisor’ is
usually filled by foreign bases economists — even after 70 years of
Independence. The civil services were not alarmed at their entry or even when
these economists did not return to their universities in the US, like Kaushik
Basu or Rajan did. They hardly noticed the trickle of such contract based
employees who often bypassed the UPSC rules and took no note when their terms
were extended under various provisions, or they moved from job to job, within
government. It was only when some of these ‘professionals’ reached ministerial status
and rose even higher, that the regular bureaucrats woke up. But then, these ‘professionals’
were well qualified and so very few in number. Moreover, they were not ‘regular
joint secretaries or secretaries’ who replaced officers from the IAS or other
services — they were just ‘special adjuncts’.
This time, however, hackles have been
raised because the advertisement is for ‘regular joint secretaries’ and is
quite vague about their qualifications from which it looks like a case
of testing the waters before the real reason emerges. It is worth noting that
many of the earlier crop of professionals subsequently joined politics, which
is one of the several concerns expressed after the present advertisement was
issued. To appreciate better why 10 Joint Secretary level market recruits have
become the subject of so much discussion, let us try to understand what this is
all about. The highest official in the Government of India is the Secretary in
charge of a ministry: there are usually around 70 to 80 such posts for a total
of 50,000 civil servants. They, in turn, control some 60 lakh government
employees of other grades. Eight or so of these Secretary-level posts are
usually occupied by scientists and other specialists, such as the Secretaries
in charge of atomic energy, space, science & technology and statistics. The
real cutting edge of the central government is, however, at a notch or two
below, as the Secretary is usually busy with meetings, briefings, parliamentary
demands, important policy decisions and ceaseless fire-fighting or attending to
ministers. Thus, the ubiquitous Joint Secretaries — roughly 470 of them — actually
run each critical vertical in the central government.
Ten lateral level entry Joint
Secretaries may be too small a number to worry about, but it is also too small
a number to make a difference, if that is what Mr Modi desires. Of course, it
is not clear, how much power they will be given because while Mr Modi can be a
blind Dhritarashtra where his few hand-picked acolytes are concerned. He
has an established record of showering disproportionate favours on those
members of Delhi’s establishment who swore undying loyalty to him before he
became PM. In fact, besides their farsightedness in getting ‘anticipatory
affection’, one is not sure of their other skills (if any). In any case,
faculties beyond this act of suzerainty that some pledged to him during the
height of the UPA 2 regime, really do not matter to Mr Modi. He would, however,
certainly crush any civil servant or economist if he or she played ‘footsie’ with
the Opposition now, in the same manner in which Amitabh Kant or Bibek Debroy
had done. That is the fear — are we heading for ten mini-Kants recruited in one
shot — to carry out ‘special tasks’ that even the most ‘accommodative’ of
serving bureaucrats baulk at?
The media is, however, not fully correct
when it says that the IAS is threatened by the possibility of 10 external
professionals coming in laterally at the Joint Secretary level. The IAS no
longer dominates the Joint Secretary-level appointments, as the other services
have secured their rightful positions. Moreover, most states (like Gujarat,
when Mr Modi was its chief minister) are unwilling to let their officers go on
deputation to the ‘Centre’. The Opposition,
instinctively smells a rat — it sees this move (of lateral entry into the
service) as yet another attempt to ‘saffronise’ the administration — with
what looks like just the first set of 10, with more to follow. Niti Aayog CEO,
Amitabh Kant, who is certainly permitted to talk more than any Central
minister, has pronounced that we need to
be “flexible” and “transparent” in selection — without elaborating either of
the words[9]. The secretary of the
department and authorised officials of the PMO, however, maintain a strange
silence — which fuels more concerns. But Kant also announced that more lateral
recruits would be taken in, at the level of Deputy Secretary or Director in the
central ministries. An occasional breath of fresh air is surely desirable — if
one is sure of the quality of ‘professionals’ — not just their loyalty. What is
critical is that safeguards need to be put in place to ensure that a ‘lateral
entry’ Joint Secretary is not a stooge of a business house who will be
adequately rewarded by the house for extending favours to it, once this
low-paid term is over.
Senior civil servants — even of the
regular variety — are known to alter government policies to suit certain
business interests, even if this causes losses to the exchequer. A disturbing
news that one hopes is not true is of a just-tired secretary of the Human
Resources Development ministry, who drafted the controversial rules to accord
the ‘centre of excellence’ tags to even unborn universities. It is reported
that he is currently employed (which is quite immoral) on very lucrative terms
by the same business leviathan that stands to benefit from this rather illogical
rule — and that hundreds of crores of rupees are involved. The media says that
government has been unduly kind in granting special permission to this favoured
bureaucrat to serve his new master, before the quarantine period was over[10]. Like Kant, this user
friendly officer was incidentally, a blue-eyed boy of the earlier regime as
well and was posted abroad many times. Orwell’s dictum comes to mind, that ‘all
animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”. After all, the
business house is so close to the centre of power. These ‘breaches’ of conduct
are rare among regular civil servants who get a pension, but what has one who
comes from the private sector and will return to it father three years to lose,
if he was to devote his energies for ‘business promotion’? There are many other
areas that need clarity and the pronouncement made about more such recruitments
to follow, needs to be spelt out in greater detail and placed in the public
domain or before Parliament
It is almost certain that the UPSC is out of the selection, as these ten are supposed to come
in for 3-year contracts — in which case it is not mandatory. Even so,
entrusting the UPSC with the selection may be less controversial, and it could
conduct special but transparent examinations, as it has done earlier.
Transperency in selection is critical, because all said and done, the maximum
salary of some $3000 a month and the usual “car and a flat” (even in south
Delhi) are not likely to get professionals settled abroad all so terribly
excited— that Kant talks of. Incidentally, only 3 of the 70 to 80 secretaries
in the government of India occupy much-envied bungalows in Lutyens Delhi and
joint secretaries are allotted quite modest flats — compared to the private
sector honchos. We are not even discussing the utter humiliation that many
public servants have to go through at hands of elected politicians and their
acolytes— in the name of democracy. Besides, when since thousands of senior
posts are lying unfilled because of the constitutional compulsion to reserve
almost half the number only for eligible SC, ST and OBC candidates, the present
regime must clarify wether these 10 are to follow this reservation norms. Or
else, ‘contract employment’ may well be misused to defeat the reserved quotas — and Dalits do have a point.
No one says that government does not
require lateral entrants at each level to bring in special skills — we already
have two Secretaries selected from the open market. At the same time, IAS and
other officers — many of whom are toppers from the IITs and IIMs or
qualified doctors, lawyers, or economists — also need to be encouraged to
specialise, after their district phase is over. But professional specialisation of IAS
officers has not been encouraged by Mr Modi’s own tightly-controlled
personnel department or by state governments. As a result, these
highly-qualified professionals and university toppers (who constitute the bulk
of the IAS) are usually made to move from atomic energy to gobar gas — without
being allowed to acquire the desired degree of ‘specialisation’. This is where
Mr Modi could have made the historic difference —that was expected of him — by
encouraging specialisation and professionalisation among the highly-qualified
existing officers, who have also acquired 20 or more years of ‘hands on’ experience
in administration from the village level upward, before being selected as joint
secretaries —through a rather tough process of weeding out.
Repeating an old order
Then we get a third hammer from Mr Modi.
((Even more)) Very recently, the central government has written to the states
to agree to a rule that IAS officers at the level of Secretary and Additional
Secretary are henceforth to be assessed on their attitude towards the weaker
sections of society. This is quite superfluous as this provision was embedded
in the All India Services Conduct Rules a long time ago, and has since been one
of the major criteria on which ‘performance’ is judged. If Mr Modi
needed to send placatory signals to the weaker sections of society — that are
quite disappointed with him and his government — he could very well do so on
his weekly radio broadcast, Man Ki Baat. It is doubtful whether former Human
Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani’s scandalously insensitive
handling of Rohith Vemula’s suicide or the
repression let loose on Dalits after the clash at their Bhima Koregaon
anniversary or even the attacks and murder of carcass flayers will be
forgotten, because such a legal provision is being reiterated. But the
high-handed manner in which state partners in our federal set-up were literally
ordered to agree immediately to this order or face political humiliation is
characteristic of Mr Modi’s regime. The shots were,
sadly, fired from the shoulders of the IAS.
Equally important is the mention that
Secretaries and Additional Secretaries would be assessed on both “financial integrity” and “moral integrity”. But this
is not only not a new provision, a small but viscous number have always managed
to prosper under corrupt political masters. There are exactly 5004 IAS officers
in India (in a population of 125 crores) out of which some 65 to 70 make it as
Secretaries in the central government — and Mr Modi has certainly failed “to improve their
efficiency”. Even though civil servants are constantly under multiple
surveillance, the existing vexatious procedures for convicting any government
official (not only those in the IAS, IPS or IFS) are really self-defeating.
Thoroughly upright seniors can hardly punish their corrupt juniors at present,
because of processes that take decades and exonerates most. The ‘dreaded 3 Cs’, the CBI, the
CVC (Central Vigilance Commission) and the CAG (Comptroller and Auditor
General), can hardly function effectively as they are hamstrung by the same
dilatory procedures. Yet, the ‘the 3 Cs’ are
either a reason for serving officers refusing to take risks or for really
injecting terror — without hardly being able to check corruption so rampant in
the bureaucracy.
Mr
Modi would have been better served if took a he took a break from his ‘loyalists’
and consulted the very few ‘reformist Secretaries’
who
are beyond fear or favour. This creaking bureaucratic system that was a product
of our ‘Soviet’ period that preceded economic
liberalisation is
screaming for reforms. For instance, a simple ‘out of the box’ solution is to hold secret ballots periodically in every government office, to
create a reliable database of ‘marked officials’ — those whose financial or
moral integrity is in question. Everyone in the
office knows who they are, but the honest majority suffer in silence as
these nefarious elements are favoured by every regime. Many of them are also
the most litigant ones and some also lead employees’ unions. They can make life
miserable for their colleagues or superiors by manufacturing spurious
complaints against them. All this is quite well known — obviously to someone
who has completed 16 years in overloading it over the bureaucracy — in one
continuing stretch. He is surely aware that the existing rules do not encourage
action against the corrupt, the immoral and the troublemakers. The suggestion
is that once such a database is created through a series of ‘secret ballots’,
government would have evidence that even the courts would accept and would not
have to wait for the bribe to be taken or a woman to be actually molested. It
could direct the attention of the investigating agencies to the leads provided
by this data and go hammer and tongs after the ‘marked officials’ — and not
plod as at present only after formal complaints are lodged. Instead, in Mr
Modis’ regime, an officer like former Coal Secretary HC Gupta was convicted and
awarded a jail sentence, even though all his colleagues swear that he was an
honest officer who may just have slipped up.
If we agree that the UPSC’s highly competitive examinations still
select the best candidates possible, we need to examine what happens
thereafter. Young officers are thrown into a system where they are
brutalised by the political class and unscrupulous seniors, resulting in many
among them becoming corrupt, callous, inefficient or simply lazy. Every
government since Independence — including this most hyped one — is equally guilty
of permitting the political class to bully civil servants and traumatised them
into inactivity, connivance or even cash partnerships. The vast majority has
simply been numbed into compliance. Narendra Modi is one of the rarest rulers
who really did not need to curry favour with the dirtiest layer of the
political class — as he could make or break anyone. He missed his tryst with
destiny by unfortunately mesmerising himself with his unreal oratory[11] and in masquerading
unapologetic narcissism as state policy[12]. Mr Modi could have used
his electoral mandate to institute permanent civil service reforms. Instead, he
allowed himself to be distracted by other preoccupations and then scrambled in
his last year, to tighten a screw here and a nut there — but also ensure that
his personal power and glory increased, at any cost.
Consequentially, the corrupt tax
officer extorts even more and the slothy sleep during office hours. He
bludgeoned the top layer of the bureaucracy but could never elicit their
confidence in rebuilding India, shoulder to shoulder. His crudely communal
approach to governance may not have elicited horror from serving officers, most
of are terrified of ‘big brother’ watching them all the time, but retired
officials rose up against a PM and his regime’s impropriety — as never before
in India’s history. His government will surely go down in history as one which
spread fear amongst insecure civil servants for no productive reason, but one
where sycophants prospered to dizzying heights, while the totally upright,
imaginative and innovative officials went unconsulted, unwanted or unrewarded.
