A civil decline

Successive governments have been guilty of marginalising civil servants and economists have become a rare breed in the corridors of power.

India's Constitution makers did not want a committed bureaucracy to run governments in states and the Centre. Which is why they mandated that the civil service will provide continuity of administration through a national pool of officers, which can be tapped by both states and the Centre.

While the political leadership may change after every election, the civil service will provide the much-needed link and stability in administration.

That principle, however, has been diluted in many ways and on several occasions in the last 30 years. Senior civil servants have been shuffled around almost every time there has been a change of government at the Centre since 1977.

Civil servants, believed to have been close to an earlier regime, have been sent back to the states or parked in some insignificant jobs in New Delhi till their retirement.

You could argue that all this did not happen till 1977 because till then the Congress party had an uninterrupted rule at the Centre and, therefore, there was no need to reshuffle secretaries. But all this changed when the Congress party was voted out in the 1977 general elections held after the 18-month Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi.

The Janata Party government, headed by Morarji Desai, was ruthless in its dealings with even those secretaries whose only fault was that they carried out instructions of the political establishment during the Emergency.

Nirmal Mukherji, who was the cabinet secretary then, had the misfortune of being told by his boss that he was trying to shield a fellow officer on religious grounds.

Mukherji was a Christian and the officer he was accused of shielding was also a Christian, P C Alexander, who was then the commerce secretary. Mukherji was so upset that he decided to quit, but was later persuaded to stay till his term came to an end.

The Congress party returned to power in 1980. There was a large-scale secretarial change again. The message that dawned on civil servants was that they should not take their jobs for granted, particularly when there is a change of government. Rajiv Gandhi as prime minister made no effort to correct this impression.

On the contrary, he cut short the tenure of his cabinet secretary, P K Kaul, and packed him off to the US. Worse, he announced his intention to appoint a new foreign secretary at a press conference, a move that forced the incumbent foreign secretary to put in his papers.

Successive governments have changed bureaucrats at will, paying scant regard to the sanctity of tenures and the belief that a civil servant is a non-partisan officer entrusted with the responsibility of serving a government of any political affiliation.

The National Front government headed by V P Singh, the Narasimha Rao government, the Vajpayee government and now the Manmohan Singh government "" all are guilty of treating bureaucrats with suspicion if they served a previous regime. This is a damaging change that now seems irreversible. Unfortunately, bureaucrats have learnt to live with this and often pander to their politician bosses for survival.

This, however, is only one among the many other reasons for which the quality of administration offered by the civil service has deteriorated over the last 30 years. Almost coinciding with the imposition of the Emergency, the government abolished the concept of a central pool of officers.

The earlier practice was that bright civil servants would be identified at an early stage and groomed to become part of this central pool to serve in different ministries at the Centre.

No specific reason was cited while dismantling this system in the mid-1970s, but its consequence was that the central government no longer had easy recourse to competent officers with proven track records. If a ministry wanted to look for bright officers, it had to scan the entire list of civil servants.

Worse, the system of inducting private sector experts and managers into government service was discontinued. The Industrial Management Pool (IMP) threw up an array of fine officers like D V Kapur, V Krishnamurthy, Mantosh Sondhi and Wadud Khan, all of whom headed key economic ministries during the 70s and the 80s.

Officers from the IMP provided a range of choice to the government for manning its key positions. But there was opposition from officers belonging to the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), who did not want their monopoly of top secretarial jobs to be threatened. They lobbied hard for the discontinuation of the IMP and succeeded, but governance suffered.

Equally worrisome is the sharp decline in the number of professionals occupying important positions in the government. There was a time when almost all the economic ministries had an accomplished economist playing a key role as a member of that ministry's think tank.

In the 1990s, there was Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Shankar N Acharya in the finance ministry, Rakesh Mohan in the industry ministry and Jayanto Roy in the commerce ministry.

Barring the finance ministry, economists are rare to find in a senior position in the government today. This too is a change that does not augur well for the civil service and governance.