IAS not really threatened by lateral recruitment of Jt Secy officers

The government’s recent advertisement inviting applications from the open market from Indian nationals with expertise in the areas of finance, agriculture, transport, shipping, environment, renewable energy, civil aviation and commerce for ten joint secretary level positions in various central Ministries has drawn considerable attention.

It has been condemned by some as an attempt to facilitate the entry of people committed to the present government’s ideology, or recruit employees working for such industrialists who are close to the ruling party. On the other hand, many even in the civil services have hailed this step as it would bring in fresh and vibrant ideas by exposing the top civil service to competition, and would promote better policy formulation based on expert domain knowledge.

With some qualifications, I welcome the idea. First, in the past too, experts have been inducted at senior positions in government, often without any advertisement. Many of them such as Dr Manmohan Singh, Bimal Jalan, Lovraj Kumar, Vijay Kelkar, Montek Ahluwalia, Rakesh Mohan, Jairam Ramesh and Arvind Subramanian contributed substantially in senior positions.

As a general rule, scientific ministries such as Space or Atomic Energy are less hierarchically organised and have resorted to lateral entry more liberally. Thus, the experiment of inducting outsiders in government is not new. Two, only ten positions have been advertised as against a total strength of about 300 Joint Secretaries in the Central government. This should not cause any insecurity in the minds of UPSC recruited career bureaucrats that it would minimise their scope for promotion.

Three, there is an acute shortage of middle level IAS officers with 18 to 25 years of seniority, as the annual recruitment to the IAS in the 1990s was curtailed to just about 60-70 as against the present recruitment of about 180 per batch. This was done under an illusion that economic liberalisation would vastly reduce the need for central staffing. However, the reverse happened, as with enhanced revenues, GOI expanded its role not only in social sector, such as anti-poverty programmes, education, health and tribal welfare, but also in many new emerging sectors such as telecommunications, IT, climate change, and road transport.

Due to overall shortage, most states are unwilling to release senior IAS officers for central deputation leading to a bizarre situation where a Railway Traffic Officer works as Joint Secretary Health, and an Ordnance Service guy finds himself in the Ministry of Tribal Affairs!

Four, the IAS too lacks the necessary domain knowledge so essential for effective policy making and delivery. This service is primarily responsible for India’s failure to achieve MDG goals in hunger, health, malnutrition, sanitation, and gender, as most IAS officers can neither design effective programmes nor can implement them with accountability.

Once they join the civil service in the states they are shuffled after short tenures from one to the other department, so much so that they hardly get an opportunity to develop an understanding of technical aspects of a problem or acquire the necessary professional expertise.

A high degree of professionalism ought to be the dominant characteristic of a modern bureaucracy. The fatal failing of the Indian bureaucracy has been its low level of professional competence. The IAS officer spends more than half of his tenure on policy desks where domain knowledge is a vital prerequisite.

However, in the present environment there is no incentive for a young civil servant to acquire knowledge or improve his skills. As years pass by, there is thus an exponential growth in both his ignorance and arrogance. It is said that in the house of an IAS officer one would find only three books - the railway timetable, because he is always being shunted from one post to the other, a popular news magazine because that is his level of interest, and of course, the civil list - that describes the service hierarchy!

Finally, the fear that the outsider Joint Secretary would be ideologically inclined to the present regime needs to be judged in the context of mushrooming growth of “committed” bureaucracy (I would place that number as between 25 to 50% of the total, depending upon the state) that has taken place over the decades for a variety of reasons, the most important being cut-throat competition that exists in the IAS for important positions both at the state and central levels.

Due to the control that the IAS lobby exerts on the system, a large number of redundant posts in the super-time and superior scales have been created to ensure them quick promotions. Often a senior post has been split, thus diluting and diminishing the scale of responsibilities attached with the post. For instance, in UP against the post of one Chief Secretary, there are 18 officers now in equivalent but far less important posts drawing the same salary.

This inverted pyramid (too many people at the top and too few in the middle & lower rungs) has apparently been created to avoid demoralisation due to stagnation, but the net result has been just the opposite.

First, it leads to cut throat competition within the service to grab important slots. The old camaraderie has vanished. Instances are not rare when IAS officers wanting plum jobs have gone to the politicians denigrating their competitors. Second, this no-holds-barred competition is exploited by politicians in playing one against the other leading to officers becoming more pliable. The lure of after-retirement sinecures further increases the number of those who would be willing to crawl when asked to bend.

However, getting only ten Joint Secretaries from the open market is not enough to radically professionalise the civil service. The government needs to promote specialisation by insisting on stable tenure in the states so that there is incentive for the IAS to acquire expertise in their chosen sectors. An IAS officer who has seen the plight of patients at the district level and has also worked in the state medical department would be a far more effective Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare than a doctor with specialisation in just one narrow subject.

Therefore, after the first ten years of service, each IAS officer should be encouraged to specialise in one or two chosen sectors by not only giving them long tenures but even permitting them to join academic or research organisations where they could improve their intellectual skills.

Lastly, the present proposal would not have attracted adverse criticism had the UPSC been involved in the recruitment process. One can only hope that the selection committee headed by the Cabinet Secretary is impartial, objective and transparent, and puts up the CV of selected candidates online to establish its credibility.

The author is a former IAS officer and former Secretary, Planning Commission