Catch Them Old
Thus, the idea that civil servants be made to take a mid career examination to judge whether they are fit for further promotion is a very good one. The Indian bureaucracy must be the only management instrument in the world which does not have to undergo fitness tests periodically. Currently, once a civil servant is selected at the age of 24-28 via a single examination, he (or she) doesnt have to prove himself for the rest of his career. Promotions come by seniority and good postings depend on how useful he makes himself to the politicians. Is it any wonder, then, that the civil service has become a major obstacle to dynamic progress?
However, taking periodic fitness tests, as they make you do in the armed forces, is only the beginning of the solution. It is equally important that the tests be designed properly so that what emerges is a genuine result and not a make-believe one aimed at meeting formal criteria for promotion. It is worth recalling, in this context, the tests which officers not knowing the local language were made to take after the first two years in the district. Many of them used to simply order the deputy collector or the tehsildar to write the exam, who would take care that the sahib didnt score suspiciously high marks. This sort of short-circuiting of the system must be made impossible. Actually, it could well be that it is also necessary to recast even the recruitment examinations so that it is aptitude and not just the capacity for mugged up notes which is tested. At present, engineers take exams in constitutional history, doctors in international law and economists in British history. What is more, they get in not
because of how much they know but because they know the barest minimum. The selection criteria are thus skewed in favour of smatterings of knowledge, the sine qua non for a general administrator, rather than depth, which a specialist would have. But times have changed and general administrators while being worth their weight in gold in some limited functions are now a clear liability in most occupations. So apart from mid-career fitness tests, the government also needs to tackle this problem.