A K Bhattacharya: Outstanding deficiency

RAISINA HILL

A recent internal study of the performance evaluation reports of Indian Administrative Services (IAS) officers showed that more than three-fourths of them secured outstanding grades.

This finding raises the obvious query: if more than 75 per cent of senior government officers are outstanding, why should there be a general cry of distress over the lack of competent officers to take charge of important functions and responsibilities at the Centre?

Surely this suggests that there is something wrong with our civil service today. Most ministers complain about the deteriorating quality of civil servants that are being picked up through the selection process for postings at the central ministries.

None other than Finance Minister Jaswant Singh has complained that he would like to get the best bureaucrats, but he does not have much of a choice as the general quality of civil servants has fallen.

Raise this issue for discussion with a serving bureaucrat and you are likely to be told how the government is to be blamed for the manner in which it has systematically paralysed the effectiveness of the premier service.

Quiz him further, he will zero in on the completely inadequate and largely faulty performance appraisal system that has throttled whatever growth potential a young IAS officer might have at the start of his career. It is patently untrue to claim that there are not enough bright IAS officers in the system, says a senior government official.

The problem, according to him, is that the promotion procedures and the performance appraisal system are not effective enough to throw the best of the officers before the selection committees for top jobs in the central ministries.

Indeed, there are many problems with the civil service. First, there is no system in place to weed out the deadwood. Everyone acknowledges that officers who show no competence or are of doubtful integrity or of poor health should be screened and thrown out of the system.

The rules even stipulate that incompetent officers can be compulsorily retired after 50 years of age or 20 years of service. But where is the system to identify officials who can be compulsorily retired either because of incompetence, ill-health or doubtful integrity? Thus, the provision of compulsory retirement has largely remained on paper.

Second, civil servants are allowed to graduate from their district assignments to the state secretariats and further to the central ministries at New Delhi without their going through a training or an orientation process.

A district job requires a civil servant to implement programmes and policies while he is expected to frame those very programmes and policies once he is in the state secretariat or in New Delhi. This shift in focus is a critical element in the growth of a civil servant. But in reality no attention is paid to this need.

Thus, an official who was looking after distribution of foodgrain to the poor in a village one day is asked to plan for the financial allocation for primary schools the next day. Worse, he may be sent to New Delhi to negotiate with the World Bank for a loan for a power project in the central sector. A civil servant today grows in the system without acquiring any domain knowledge.

So why not allow the civil servants to choose any one among a variety of domains, in which the government would like its officers to specialise.

They could be social sectors like education and health, agriculture, culture and information, energy, information technology, public finance, industry, trade, defence, housing or personnel affairs. Once a civil servant opts for one of these domains at an early stage of his career, his future growth path becomes clear and his future postings also can carry some logic.

In the process, the possibility of an official, dealing with loans for cattle farmers till yesterday, deciding on the introduction of value added tax the following day can be ruled out.

Third, the process of selecting the IAS officials for their next postings is not foolproof. An IAS officer's next posting is decided by a panel consisting of senior officials from the same state.

Thus, if the official is competent, the state does not want to relieve him of his responsibilities and instead gives him a better posting within the state.

That means that there are fewer chances of good officials being sent for posting at central ministries. A way out could be to include a central government nominee on all such selection panels. Aided by the domain preference of the officials concerned, the selection panel can do a far better job optimising the use of the right officer for the right job.

The civil service's biggest problem, however, is that the government is not unaware of these inadequacies and can remove them quite easily.

Some months ago, the Surinder Nath (former chairman of the Union Public Service Commission) committee set up to make recommendations to improve the performance appraisal system, promotions and lateral movements of IAS and other Group A services made a detailed analysis of the problems and offered many sensible suggestions.

Unfortunately, these recommendations have gone the way of most committee reports and are gathering dust in government office.