The Civil Service We Deserve

Pay Commissions are concerned with pays: this may sound like a tautological banality to many but not to the spokesman of the Central Government Employees Federation, who recently drew the attention of the press to this self-evident truth. To him and his confreres, the only point of interest in the Pandian Commissions report is the new pay scales and the hidden perks. To them, the tables are more important than the text. All that gas in the terms of reference about work methods and work environment, .... promoting efficiency in administration, reducing redundant paperwork and optimising the size of the government machinery is to let the Commission pad its report to a respectable size 172 chapters running to 1,600 odd pages.

 

Thus it was that while editorial writers were waxing eloquent over the wisdom of the Commissions long-term recommendations on cutting the flab and having a trimmer bureaucracy, the news columns were full of shrill protests about inadequate salary hikes, invidious proposals that deepened the disparities in salaries between officers and the staff, between the IAS and lesser services and innumerable other micro nitty-gritties of immediate consequence to government employees. Insofar as the employees, trade unions and Left parties in the government took notice of the longer term recommendations, they latched only on to such suggestions as (perish the thought!) not filling the 3.5 lakh posts currently lying vacant, and cut employee strength by 30 per cent over a decade. As for the impact, both short and long-term, on government finances an increase of some Rs 9,500 crore per year they couldnt care less. Budgetary deficit, fiscal deficit, monetised deficit etc are all IMF shibboleths.

Not that the disappointments and resentments are wholly unjustified. It is true that the differential between the lowest and highest salaries is one to 10; and the recommended increase in basic pay at the highest level is a hefty 126 per cent while that at the lowest is a mere 23 per cent. Rubbing salt in the wound, the Commission has suggested the scrapping of the much abused overtime allowance and reversion to a six-day week. The tax exemption on allowances including DA is hardly a matter for jubilation. Dubious in principle and, possibly, even illegal, as discriminatory against non-government employees, its attractions are rather illusory: at the current, no-tax base slab of Rs 40,000 plus standard deduction and other exemptions, employees in the lowest three rungs may not qualify as taxpayers at all.

But intra-services frustration apart, there is a case for increasing the monetary rewards for senior civil servants, if only to enable them to look in the eye the company executive who grovels before them for a licence or a contract. Old fashioned folks might think that this power to confer or withhold vital permissions is compensation enough, for power is as much an aphrodisiac as money. But they are blind to modern realities of what inflation does to morale. But then it is a Sisyphean exercise to match civil service salaries with corporate salaries and hidden perks. Even Singapore, the only country that was heroically trying to approximate civil servant remuneration to that available in the best private sector companies, has recently had to cut down civil service salaries.

Less defensible are some of the novel goodies like the telephone orderly allowance of Rs 1,500 per month for the higher mandarins and that in an age of pagers, answering machines and cellular phones! This is the sort of thing that makes the fetchers and carriers in the services feel that the Commission is biased in favour of the heaven-born service and is seeking to perpetuate feudal paraphernalia of the mai baap raj rather than usher in a modern, functional, higher civil service.

For all its declared enthusiasm for a non-status-oriented higher civil service imbued with managerial professionalism one senses in the Commissions thinking a streak of superstitious awe towards the IAS. This impression is strengthened by its suggestion of a reversion to the pre-Independence scheme of separate competitive examinations for the ICS (now IAS) and the lesser services. Without the benefit of the full report, it is difficult to judge the logic that prevailed with the Commission in wanting to change the recruitment pattern. But on the face of it, it does seem unnecessary.

Even before Independence, the ICS component of the top echelons in the central secretariat had been leavened with entrants from other services by devices like the finance and commerce pool. And though the pool itself had later been formally abandoned, there have been any number of people from other services such as the audit and accounts cadres, holding the highest responsibility with distinction.

One wonders whether the Commission has had the benefit of an excellent report by a committee, set up if memory serves by the UPSC some years ago. This had recommended again if memory isnt playing tricks a recruitment strategy of catching school leavers for a five-year all purpose civil service exposure and then deciding where they should be placed on the basis of their aptitudes. This should be the preferred mode of creating a competent civil service.

(By the way, though it is not quite germane to the argument on hand, a parenthetical comment to moderate the Commissions ardour for the IAS may be in order. This elite cadre is currently under some bad odour, what with some of its members having recently been shown up as less than sea-green incorruptibles.)

If professionalisation of the civil services is the objective, perpetuation of the caste system with the IAS as the Brahmins at the top of the ladder is incongruous. A far more sensible differentiation would be between the highest mandarinate at the policy-making level say, from above joint secretaries upwards and the rest, from whichever parent service they may have come. Whomsoever you choose as the members of this mandarinate, has to be made to acquire the specialised expertise in his intended responsibility besides a certain managerial maturity.

Not many may remember how in the 50s, TTK made a revolutionary proposal: the army of clerks and peons populating the central secretariat should be demobbed. Only senior civil servants and their stenographers would be left to constitute the central civil service. Nothing came of it, of course.

A similar fate may well await this Commissions proposal to cut the central bureaucracy by a third. As with the reforms agenda, the easier part like the salary hike would be implemented pronto. But the difficult part like a leaner but functional civil service will be left to languish, especially, since it is a long term proposal. Even a strong government, relatively confident about its longevity would flinch at the prospect of implementing such a reform. Mr Deve Gowda, living on borrowed time would hardly dare. So you would be having the worst of both the worlds a bloated bureaucracy which will cost a great deal more.