In the middle of January, 14 eminent Indians, mostly from the corporate world, published their tocsin on “the general deterioration in the overall value system of the nation”. But how is this decline to be arrested? Like many other things about our country, the problem posed by corruption is also of pachydermic proportions. Problems of such magnitude can only be resolved in small chewable pieces. This is an attempt to bite a part of the corruption conundrum that is auxiliary to the more-frequently-targeted political establishment. It acquires importance from the fact that our elected representatives cannot convert their purposes (whether commendable or condemnable) into policies or programmes for execution without the support of the bureaucracy. Hence anything that can prevent corrosion in the higher echelons of the steel frame constituted by the civil services should be part of the larger solution the nation is seeking.
We have recently seen instances where policies emanating from key ministries of the Government of India have appeared to favour the very business constellations with whom the policy-framing civil servant takes employment after retirement. Apart from the lure of attractive postings (and the threat of unattractive ones), post-retirement sinecures have the greatest potential to subject senior bureaucrats to pressures and temptations. A recent trip to the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie prompted me to think of a way that our country could continue tapping its most capable public administration powerhouses (after their retirement) without letting the desire for such assignments distort decision-making in the last years of a person’s service, when the greatest power to influence the biggest decisions is wielded.
The root of the problem starts long before bureaucrats reach very senior levels because there is, in the civil services, no transparent and performance-based means of accumulating wealth that can assure its members reasonably comfortable retired lives. As they approach retirement, and the prospect of losing pay and perquisites looms closer, it would require the moral standards of a saint to allow decisions to be totally unaffected by the prospects of post-retirement assignments either with the private sector, with government agencies or with NGOs.
To continue utilising this rich lode of talent, without the distorted decision-making encouraged by the present system, my proposal is to select, through a meritocratic process, a cadre of senior advisors from civil service officers who have achieved a certain level of seniority (with an unblemished record) at the time of retirement. The secretariat of this newly formed cadre would arrange to scout for appropriate assignments for these highly experienced administrators. They would not, of course, be considered for executive positions that are meant for bureaucrats who are still in service. Moreover, there must be an independent authority to scrutinise and moderate the number of such positions created by the government itself, so that the burgeoning and expensive growth in the civil service is not simply shifted from the active civil service pocket to the post-retirement cadre pocket. As an aside, while advocating restraint in numbers, one would like to see some nurturant retirees appointed as mentors to younger civil service officers.
This proposal, however, is not about the type of positions this cadre should be used for but about finding a way to make the process of selection transparent and favour-free. Towards this end, one of the means could be to have randomly constituted selection panels from large banks of unimpeachable panelists — too numerous for anyone to be sure of influencing all the potential assessors. Evaluators from three such banks could be pooled together for any selection: Highly experienced and successful administrators/managers; experts in assessment; and domain experts.
Panels would be freshly constituted for each selection. They would be expected to achieve a consensus and document the reasoning behind their choices, which should be substantively based on proven achievement histories, demonstrated competencies and spotless track records. This is only one of the many possible ways of installing a favour-insulated selection process and the intention here is to start a dialogue for choosing the right one.
Would all positions potentially available to retired civil servants need to go through such a process? It may be difficult to mandate this rightaway, particularly for positions arising within the private sector. Over a period of time, however, if the private sector is to live up to its stated desire for rooting out the systemic causes of corruption, one should see them volunteering to follow a process that is free from the quid pro quo suspicion that currently pervades appointments of retired civil servants.
It is unlikely that such a plan, for purely merit-based placement, will win universal or immediate acceptance. Resistance to it can come from those political potentates who use post-retirement pralines to guarantee pre-retirement prostration, from business leaders whose core competency is ‘managing’ government policy and even from some civil servants who — having risked their reputations to invest in the ‘quo’ — are now patiently waiting for the post-retirement ‘quid’ to be paid out. On the other hand, the idea should find favour with those bureaucrats who have been prevented, by moral sense or fortune, from designing nests lined with extraneously-influenced decisions. The levelled playing field here proposed should give honest civil servants an opportunity to capitalise on their career-long achievements and will go a long way in removing the taint that is associated with ‘big-ticket’ government decision-making.
The author is CEO, Banner Global Consulting. visty.banaji@bannerconsulting.in
