IAS officer to constable: Govt training for employees has hits and misses

Mission Karmayogi is ambitious in its target but vague about how civil servants are using what they learn

“You will be surprised to know the government has over a thousand training institutions for (its) employees. This is the first time a rating exercise has begun with them,” Praveen Singh Pardeshi, member (administration) at the Capacity Building Commission, told this correspondent.

The Mission Karmayogi is meant for government employees and the Capacity Building Commission is almost like its regulator. Four years into the mission as this government’s term ends, is a good time for stock taking.

It started with meetings Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his first term from 2014 to 2019 held with batches of India government officers who had trained at domestic and foreign institutions. “What have you applied from your learnings to the work you do?” Modi asked them. Only a few officers could make the connection, said a political leader aware of the discussions.  It was this disconnect that Mission Karmayogi set out to restore.

The aim is to offer training, which matters, to 15 million government employees, ranging from the office of the cabinet secretary to the local police constable. Senior officers, for instance, were to train in using artificial intelligence and those at the bottom need to know how to respond to citizens.

Market to training government employees—regulator:

The Capacity Building Commission decides how this gigantic mission moves and Pardeshi, is its only government member. The commission’s other members are from the private sector or civil society, including chairman Adil Zainulbhai, former India chief of McKinsey. The commission’s framework came into place in 2020, with the union cabinet approving the rollout.

The one thing Mission Karmayogi is not is to cut the power of the IAS over the civil administration of the country. It does not decide lateral entrants to the central government. There have been four batches of lateral entrants to the government since 2018 when the first advertisements were put out. About 50 such people have joined the government since then, but the actual numbers in harness are even lower as some have quit. Decisions about lateral entry are the remit of the Department of Personnel and Training, the nodal body running Mission Karmayogi.

The Karmayogi Mission is vague about what happens if a government employee does not use their training skills. It has helped train most of the Delhi Police personnel, especially how to handle their relations with the citizens. What happens to those who do not use the soft skills they got in the training?

“These are significant issues,” said Vinod Rai, editor of ‘Transforming the Steel Frame: Promise and Paradox of Civil Service Reform‘, a collection of essays on improving government employees. He agreed that the Mission is useful but suggested that the government offer incentives to those who use their training. “Unless civil servants see a uniform risk for having failed to meet the grade, training can go only up to a limited extent”, he said.  

The Commission is trying to create demand from within government departments and ministries for deploying skills, he said. In response, it is incentivising training institutions to offer courses that meet those demands. In other words, the Commission is playing the demand-and-supply game.

It offers functional supervision of these training institutions handing out ratings like a star system. After three years since those were launched, the institutions have begun to value these ratings. Better ratings help them to expand their budgets and draw in more government employees as students.  One of those help means facilitating the preparation of annual capacity-building plans. There is good money each department allocates to these institutions which are therefore most keen to land those annual contracts. A rating system will help.

Envisioned as one of the largest capacity-building initiatives in Government anywhere in the world, Mission Karmayogi aims to transform approximately 1.5 crore government officials across the Centre, the States, and the local bodies.

Pardeshi reels out the numbers achieved so far. “We aim to expand the knowledge, change attitudes and build skills or KAS among the government employees”. More than 100 training institutions have come on board and nearly 4 lakh employees have taken the off-line and online courses. Explaining the utility of the training he offers the apocryphal example of a mid-level government officer who is suddenly transferred from the Home Ministry, a largely police job to say finance, and opens a file on public-private partnership. The officer, while suitable for the rank, does not know the job and has nowhere to turn. Incidentally, government personnel get transferred often, to departments whose work they have no clue about.

A similar experiment is underway in another corner of Mission Karmayogi in the form of a special-purpose vehicle called Karmayogi Bharat. Abhishek Singh, chief executive officer of the institution, likens it to an e-learning marketplace.

“Whenever any government employee joins a seat, she can sign up for a course that suits her. The department pays her fees, which is Rs 431 per employee. We bring in the experts who administer the courses online”, says Singh demonstrating the way this Section 8 company operates.

One of the most popular courses on offer is stress management. The relatively senior civil servants are the largest consumers. The other is the Prevention of Sexual Harassment at Workplace among the 902 courses on offer. “The recruits through the Rozgar Mela (employment fairs) have a large appetite for basic courses”, says Singh. Since last year, the Modi government has been handing out rapid employment offers in bunches in demonstration of the number of jobs it has been generating. Karmayogi Bharat has developed a set of eight courses to help all these appointees get acclimatized to government policies, and “transition smoothly into their new roles” as government release notes.

Despite initial reservations, feedback from government employees, generated by the Quality Council of India of police personnel shows a clear improvement in performance with the training. The time spent waiting by citizens, a bug bear at police stations have clearly come down, the survey done in 2023 showed. 

Doing away with cadres:

In the governance long form, ministries and departments have used the cadres to identify the needed skill sets. So a tax official was good for one set of work, railway personnel for running a factory. Not anymore, possibly.

Between the Capacity Building Commission and Karmayogi Bharat, the old-school apparatus of training government employees is likely to recede. A future government can recruit employees, and train them through these systems in quick time, possibly also on the job. So far, courses like tax manuals, and auditing are not onboarded on these portals, but those on management skills, a critical tool for government employees, are already there. Cadres could become defunct soon too.

Is there a possibility for enabling the private sector to also get into this business? “Many of the courses were designed by private sector entities”, says Singh. To make the private sector a simultaneous partner is a thought that is still some way off, however.