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| Trip report: MEA culpa on FSI training |
| Jyoti Malhotra / New Delhi Nov 30, 2009, 01:35 IST |
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As with earlier recommendations for basic change, the IFS hasn’t moved on the latest one.
The website home-page of the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), run by the ministry of external affairs (MEA), relegates the Abid Hussain committee report on improving the institute’s working to near the bottom of the screen, perhaps an indication of the value it attaches to the high-powered report that it commissioned a couple of years ago. The report was given this January.
The report is straightforward, contextualising the FSI in the changing world order, and pointing out that MEA’s personnel – probationers at the bottom of the pile, mid-career diplomats with 26-28 years of experience, as well as heads of missions abroad – should be constantly retrained to fully equipp them to be the “new front soldiers…of transformational diplomacy,” code for an “activist vision to influence change”.
The authors — Abid Hussain and Kishan Rana, former ambassadors to the US and Germany, respectively (former Foreign Secretary Lalit Mansingh left the group midway) – argue that the old world ended when the Soviet Union broke up in end-1991, and shibboleths like non-alignment should have been dumped, but the MEA clings to the chimera of the past, instead of re-tooling for a multi-polar present.
“We can no longer treat our foreign policy as something architectured along the policy of non-alignment. The option of turning our back to certain major powers is no longer available to us. Luxury of that choice is over. We have to get used to the new conditions,” say the opening lines of the report.
The Indian Foreign Service is still tiny, even after the then foreign secretary, Shyam Saran, persuaded the government in 2004 to double the number in its officer corps from 600 to 1,200. (Tiny Singapore has 487 officers, the UK has 3,600 and the US 19,667.) Second, it shares a selection procedure with the other civil services, even though its demands are different. Third, its mid-career training is woefully inadequate, consisting of email-order training for director-level officers and month-long training for joint secretary-level officers at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad and at the FSI, Delhi, introduced earlier this year. Fourth, it refuses to allow external expertise common to several other foreign services (notably Britain), although lateral entry from other services up to the director level is now encouraged.
The first report of its kind since the Pillai committee of 1966, the Sen committee of 1983 which went into the functioning of Indian embassies abroad (but whose report never saw the light of day) and the Satinder Lambah committee of 2002 (whose recommendation that the MEA spokesperson focus on his job rather than dissipate his energies on commissioning films and other projects was accepted), a key recommendation of the Abid Hussain report is to cut the duration of the training undergone by the newly-inducted probationer, from two years to 12-14 months, and substituting the classroom with the controlled drama and hard work of hands-on negotiations.
There are other suggestions on upgrading the FSI’s library by equipping it with a computer-aided language lab, improve the training of IFS ‘B’ officers (those not directly recruited as officers but as staff) and their spouses, including on protocol and entertainment, and abandon discriminatory descriptions such as ‘lower division clerk’ and ‘upper division clerk’ and replace these with the hierarchy-neutral ‘desk officers’.
Among the most path-breaking recommendations is the one that probationers should be evaluated on how they conduct themselves in modules on international affairs, economic and commercial diplomacy that are part of FSI training, and that the MEA “could consider re-ranking their service seniority on the basis of the marks obtained”.
If this recommendation is accepted, diplomats say, it will lay to rest the current outmoded system which considers sacrosanct the marks obtained by the probationer in his IFS exam right till the end of his career, irrespective of how he has performed in between.
The diplomats agreed that the current system encourages them to look at “options outside the system,” such as the political party in power to fast-track their career ambitions. One retired diplomat recounted the anecdote about Salman Haider, topper of the 1960 batch who went on to become Foreign Secretary, who when asked by Jawaharlal Nehru why he had joined the IFS, said, “because there is too much interference in the IAS!”
Meanwhile, there is the recommendation to make English compulsory, even though the civil services exam is held in a variety of languages, since it is the language of diplomacy. Rana pointed out that trainee diplomats all over the world, whether Japan, China or Russia, are put through an intensive English programme to bring them up to speed on the niceties of the language.
“It doesn’t matter in the IAS if you can spell correctly or not, but in the IFS it certainly does,” said Abid Hussain.
But Ajay Chowdhry, the FSI dean, admitted that the change after the Abid Hussain report was given is more “fine-tuning” than drastic. The courses for foreign diplomats have “more emphasis on issues of international relations, like climate change and globalization,” while courses for probationers have “more emphasis on India’s cultural heritage, including lectures on Indian philosophy”. Still, Chowdhry and the rest of the MEA need only look at the website of the Diplo Foundation (www.diplomacy.edu), which offers online courses through the University of Malta, to get a taste of where the rest of the world is going – and how India continues to be caught in a time warp. “Our problem is not one of ideas, but of implementation,” said Rana.
Add to that the misuse of privilege, and the new MEA has its hands full. One story on the diplomatic circuit that refuses to die is how Surendra Kumar, the FSI’s previous dean whose idea it was to commission the Abid Hussain report, used a farewell function for foreign diplomats to launch his own book of Hindi poetry. Kumar, since retired, is of course beyond the pale of any course correction of his own.
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