T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: Training the IAS? Why bother?

LINE & LENGTH

IAS officers do things for which they have not been trained, and never what they have been trained for.

There was a peculiar news item in the Indian Express a few days ago. "Harvard, Duke and Syracuse will help upgrade IAS officers", the headline read. The idea, said the story, was to "upgrade the skills of India's top bureaucrats in what is the first-ever official mid-career training programme meant to help officers better cope with the complex, changing world of policymaking."

My first reaction was that India's most important trade union had pulled off another coup. The report said that "government rules will be amended to make attendance in these three programmes compulsory for all IAS officers". The cost is going to be Rs 45 crore, to be met by the taxpayer, naturally. To what end? Sweet b...r all, as with all such training schemes.

But it is not entirely the fault of the sweeties in the IAS. True, by the time they have been there for 15 years, about 50 per cent become completely useless. After 25 years, the proportion rises to 80 per cent.

But one has to grant it to the lads: the "system" too is lousy. As someone high-up in the works put it, it excels in turning racehorses into mules by completely disregarding what an officer has been trained for.

Let me illustrate from a very small""but wholly generalisable""sample, namely, my family. In 1963, one of my uncles who had joined the IAS in 1948 was sent off to Harvard for training. He spent a year there. When he came back he was sent off as health secretary in MP although he had never worked in health before. He had hardly settled in the job when he was sent off as Commissioner, Jammu. About 14 months later he was brought back to Delhi in the home ministry as joint secretary for political affairs. He then spent a long time in that post. However, in the events that led up to the Emergency, he aroused the ire of the Prime Minister's House (PMH). Two days after the Emergency was declared he was told to go back to MP as chief secretary. But three days later he was told, sorry, please go to Gwalior to the Board of Revenue, which, as any self-respecting IAS man will tell you, is the equivalent of kalapani. When the Janata government came to power, they made him home secretary. But when Mrs Gandhi came back three years later, she sent him packing and he spent the last 18 months of his service without a posting.

Then there is my brother-in-law. He had served for five years as deputy secretary in the defence ministry and then another five years as Director of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis. In 1983 he was selected by Mrs Gandhi to go to Harvard. When he came back in 1984, they sent him off as, guess what, health secretary in MP. He served there for a year and they brought him back to Delhi in the defence ministry as joint secretary. Then they made him additional secretary but put him in charge of administration although his Harvard training had been in defence policy. In that capacity he made a huge mistake: he asked his boss to return some government property and was rapidly sent off to the Sarkaria Commission as its member-secretary. By then his boss had become defence secretary and sure enough he was denied promotion as secretary. So he went back to MP, where they put him in charge of the Narmada project.

Another uncle, of the Bihar cadre this time, also spent a year abroad on some training wheeze. Somewhere along the line, he also did a Ph D in agricultural economics. Amazingly, he was also health secretary, in Bihar. One day, soon after Lalu Prasad had become chief minister, an MLA wanted his son be given admission to the medical college even though he had failed the entrance test. My uncle refused, and the next day the MLA walked into his room with two friends, right there in the secretariat, and they manhandled him. The government did nothing, just sent him away from the state to run the National Institute of Rural Development in Hyderabad.

A third uncle (fourth relative), this time of the Gujarat cadre, in mid-career like the others, spent a year at the London School of Economics. When he returned, they made sure that he would never be able to use what he had learnt there. He was given all manner of postings.

Much the same thing has happened to a few others in my family, from which it can be seen that in the IAS people almost always do things for which they have not been trained and never do things for which they have been trained. So why bother with training them?

The central services provide a stark contrast. There people come back to their service and the training is put to good use. Whether it is the railways, or the income tax, or the accounts services, or Customs, or whatever, the training doesn't go completely waste as it does in the IAS.

So here is a suggestion: forget about training officers of the IAS, and spend that money on the other services, at least until the "system" gets reformed. The taxpayer will get a better bang for his buck.