Not a reform: New proposal for civil servants is flawed

The department of personnel and training (DoPT) has written to line ministries asking them to examine the feasibility of the proposal

The Prime Minister's Office (PMO) has reportedly suggested a major change in the policy related to allocation of services and cadre for candidates selected every year in the All-India Civil Services Exam. The proposal is that their cadre and services should be allocated only after the three-month foundation course at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie. Currently, civil servants are allocated cadre and services before starting of the course. The department of personnel and training (DoPT), which essentially supervises the bureaucracy, has written to line ministries asking them to examine the feasibility of the proposal, which lays emphasis on the combined score obtained in both the actual examination and in the foundation course. On the one hand, some would say that it is good to de-emphasise an examination that should not by and of itself determine the entirety of a bureaucrat's career. Others would hope that a later choice of service — IAS, or the police, or the forest service — might allow for greater specialisation. 

But none of these is likely when the actual system is examined. Specialisation in 15 weeks is frankly unlikely. And the reason that the examination has been raised above the interview in terms of importance in recent decades is to minimise the effect of implicit bias in recruitment. This has served the system well, and should not be changed. Bringing these biases and skewed incentives for recruiters back into the selection process is retrograde. In general, raising the Mussoorie training programme to such rarefied levels of importance that it might decide who is in the IAS and who not is asking for trouble. It will cause divisions and unhealthy competition among the incoming batch of bureaucrats when the foundation course is meant to build cadre solidarity. It will, most importantly, encourage the young candidates to attempt to impress their instructors and seniors on campus rather than to truly learn. Questioning power and seeking knowledge are surely part of what all-India officers should be trained to do, whether or not they follow these precepts faithfully in their subsequent careers. Yet these are put at risk by the new proposal. Bureaucrats have the rest of their life to learn the tricks of flattering their political masters; they should not be selected into the more elite services and cadres on that basis.

It is unfortunate that this is the only suggested reform of the administrative set-up that has been proposed in the tenure of this government, and that this sole suggestion will, in effect, produce a bureaucracy that is worse-trained but more in thrall to its masters. Surely that could not have been the intent. That is not to say that the civil services cannot be improved. Instead of a service of generalists, subject specialists should be trained, to deal with the greater complexity of administrative and policy problems in the present day. Officers should be organised by subject and expertise, as they are in most of the world, rather than in terms of state. These and other reforms have been studied and recommended for decades, and should be acted upon. But half-baked ideas that will do nothing except create a "committed bureaucracy" should be jettisoned forthwith.