A K Bhattacharya: UPA ducks long-term solutions

RAISINA HILL

Within weeks of taking over as prime minister of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, Manmohan Singh had initiated a detailed exercise to revamp the administrative machinery at the Centre.

He sought to achieve this by exploring the possibility of introducing a new system of personnel selection and evaluation of their performance.

The prime minister even held a high-level meeting of senior officers of the Union government to motivate them to function freely and without any fear.

The report of the Surendra Nath Committee, which recommended a more scientific and appropriate method of evaluation and promotion of IAS officers, had also been revived. The UPA government began scrutinising the recommendations to see how many of them could be implemented.

Many bureaucrats at the Centre felt relieved that a better system to evaluate their performance and chart out their growth path would result from this exercise.

But such hopes were jolted recently when the government decided to reject the proposal to fix a minimum two-year tenure for the posts of the home secretary and the defence secretary.

The proposal to give some stability to these two key posts was an offshoot of the realisation that governance and administration can improve if the home secretary and the defence secretary can have a longer tenure, instead of remaining content with the average six months to one year they get to spend at the helm of those key central ministries.

The Surendra Nath Committee may not have recommended a fixed minimum tenure of two or three years for top secretaries at the Centre but internal studies conducted by the department of personnel have shown that on an average, secretaries spend six months to a year in any ministry.

Either they reach the age of retirement or they are shifted to another ministry before they complete even one year.

There are exceptions, but these are few, the most notable one being in the finance ministry during the 1990s when the finance secretary had a long uninterrupted tenure of almost six years.

What a reasonably long tenure of a secretary in one ministry can do to that ministry's performance can be gauged from how effectively and harmoniously the finance ministry functioned during the 1990s.

There was stability, vision and a goal-oriented approach discernible in everything the top secretaries team in North Block did.

Of course, having the same finance minister at the helm for five years helped, too. But a stable and uninterrupted tenure of Montek Singh Ahluwalia as the finance secretary was an important factor that helped matters.

The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee must have recognised this particularly because it saw how the finance ministry's performance and effectiveness suffered when North Block appointed five different finance secretaries in five years.

So, it introduced a system of a minimum two-year tenure for the cabinet secretary. T R Prasad was the first beneficiary. Subsequently, the UPA government, too, has retained the system of having a cabinet secretary with a fixed tenure.

The proposal to introduce a fixed tenure for the home secretary and the defence secretary was a logical extension of the same argument used earlier for the cabinet secretary. There was general expectation that the proposal would be accepted.

That it was rejected turned out to be someone's victory in the government, but a disappointment for a large number of senior officers.

Middle-rung officers in the government continue to have great expectations from the Manmohan Singh government. There is no doubt that when an officer is elevated to the rank of a secretary in a Central ministry, he has reached the fag end of his career.

In many cases, only a few years are left before he retires from service. Why can't the time-tested policy used by some private sector companies to appoint chief executives for a minimum tenure of 10 years be introduced in government service as well?

This would mean an officer has to be considered for a secretary's job when he turns 50, leaving him with 10 years in which he could implement his action plan.

This would also mean that the Surendra Nath Committee's recommendation on identifying competent officers at an early stage of their career and encouraging them to acquire domain knowledge in specified areas by rotating them among only a few related ministries of their choice would have to be implemented straightaway.

Officers who do not meet the requirement would have to be weeded out and parked in less important jobs till they opt for voluntary retirement. In this process, an officer will be ready for taking charge of a central ministry when he is 50 years old.

These may appear revolutionary ideas for a government that has rarely taken a bold decision on the personnel front. But clearly, a 50-year-old secretary with a tenure of five to 10 years will be a better proposition than a secretary who spends only six months to a year or even two years in different ministries before fading out from the service.