The Hindu Business Line : Getting the cream for civil services

If the quality of Indian administration is to improve, staff selection must be pushed down, even beyond the Hota panel suggestion, to the school level. Like the khoa test of dairymen, it will force colleges and schools to send their cream without adulteration, or face the risk of having their quota reduced and even disqualified altogether. Such multi-level selection is more egalitarian than the mass examination system now followed, says P. V. Indiresan.

ONCE, there was a sincere, kind-hearted king. He was much chagrined that however many officials he employed, little good resulted from the enormous funds he spent on people's welfare. One day, he gave vent to his bitterness — the same way Rajiv Gandhi did — and demanded of his Dewan to tell him why the system was not delivering.

Wise in the ways of kings, the Dewan kept his counsel but a few days later came up with an unusual proposal. He pointed how the sentries at the palace gate stand in the sun all day and, therefore, deserve to be given a cooling drink to refresh them. Pleased with the proposal, the king offered to check himself that the sentries got good quality drink. Therefore, a drink was brought from the vendor at the palace gate; the sentry allowed the vendor to take the drink into the palace door after checking that it contained nothing dangerous; the vendor handed the drink to the doorman, who gave it to the page boy, who gave it to the Major Domo, who passed it on to the Minister for Food Quality, who handed it to the Prime Minister and finally it reached the august hands of the king. As one would expect in a hot climate like ours, by the time the King could inspect the drink, it was warm! Much money had been spent; many officials had toiled with no result.

The moral of the story is that kings (and all senior functionaries) have the duty and responsibility to get things done, not to do them themselves. Just as there is always an upper limit to one's authority, there should also be a lower limit below which high officials should not interfere. On the other hand, if the king did not check the quality of the drink, how would he know whether the sentry got a proper drink?

India's milk sweet vendors solved this problem long before our management gurus. They have no means of checking how much water the milkman might have added to the milk. Yet, these semi-literate milk vendors have a system that ensures that they will always get unadulterated milk. Randomly, they boil the milk over a slow fire until all water evaporates to make khoa. Then, they pay the milkman not according to the number of litres of milk supplied but according to the amount of khoa obtained from that milk. That simple stratagem is good enough to ensure that milkmen supply unwatered milk every day, day after day.

Good administrators do not breathe down their subordinates all the time. They check on their juniors occasionally, randomly, and through mutually understood standards of performance. For that reason, the most important task of the top administrator is to devise a "khoa check" for the services supplied by their subordinates.

The Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, is much agitated about the poor quality of Indian administration. The remedy lies in devising better inspection systems. His personal office, the PMO undertakes many onerous tasks of oversight; the PMO will save itself a lot of bother if it devises better, simpler ways of measuring performance.

As an illustration, the principle of decentralisation may be applied to the Hota Committee proposal that recruitment of Class I officers should be done at the high school stage and not after graduation. Like most reforms, this proposal too has its advantages and its drawbacks. Its greatest advantage is that it is pro-poor; it will help more poor youth gain entry to the civil services than at present.

Many liberal experts would violently contest the claim that lowering the age of recruitment will benefit the poor. They will argue, rightly too, that the lower age will militate against children that are "slow developers". Though their argument is right, their conclusion is not. Consider, for example, two slow developers, one rich and the other poor. Consider the two options: One, recruitment at the end of high school and, two, recruitment after graduation, even post-graduation. Who will have the greater advantage, the rich youngster or the poor one?

The longer the selection is postponed, the greater will be the opportunity for the rich youngster to use money (and access) to get better tuition, more intense coaching to overcome the handicap of poor ability. After graduation, the rich will have the advantage of 16-20 years of better-paid education. When the recruitment is done the year the student passes high school that advantage dwindles to 12 years.

There is hard evidence that lower age of recruitment helps the poor more. Until the 1960s, England had the "11-plus" system by which all eleven-year-olds were divided into two streams — academic and vocational. That scheme was abandoned precisely for the objection that it is unfair to late developers who it was thought would be mainly the poor. Nothing could have been more wrong.

Those who occupied top positions in various professions in the England of 1980s were products of the 11-plus system. Those who have risen to high positions after that decade are products of the "egalitarian" comprehensive system. We would expect that, in the former case, top positions would have been held by persons from rich families, and that these days the situation would be egalitarian. Exactly the reverse is the case.

These days, almost everyone at the top of England's pyramid come from rich families. In the 1980s, there was a better mix of rich and poor. In the 11-plus system, the rich used to have only six years of better schooling. Currently, with streaming postponed to college level, the English rich, the same way as the Indian rich, gain the advantage of long years of high-cost education in private schools. Instead, the poor bear the handicap of 16-20 years of bad education in government schools.

Therefore, the Hota Committee is wise in lowering the stage of recruitment, but it would be in error if the recruitment is centralised. That would be the same as the king checking personally whether the drink is good or bad. A centrally conducted examination for all aspirants at the high school stage will be an invitation for disaster. Selection — at any rate, shortlisting — should be decentralised.

Further, lowering the stage of recruitment, and confining all recruits to a single training programme destroys diversity. At present, the civil services draw from a variety of disciplines. Such diversity is important in generalist cadres. Unfortunately, recruitment from diverse disciplines poses the problem of comparing apples with oranges.

When such universities as Stanford admit students from far-off India, they do not conduct entrance examinations. Instead, they adopt a three-stage process: One, they identify outstanding colleges in India. Two, they go by the record of the candidate in their own colleges and the estimation of their own teachers. In effect, they let these colleges do the shortlisting, and in stage three, make the final selection themselves.

Mass scale entrance examinations suffer from two defects: one, each mark difference changes the rank by hundred levels or more; there is little discrimination. Two, zero respect is shown to the teachers who taught the candidates and can assess them better than any written test. Therefore, a wise government would adopt the American model of recruitment: identify good colleges, and let the colleges do the shortlisting. In that case, there is no need to do further testing on subject knowledge; no need to have multiple question papers in such wide disciplines as physics or Punjabi language or ancient history. Once the colleges have made the shortlist, subject expertise may be taken as granted. The candidates may be examined through tests common for all, in non-subject skills such as factual and emotional intelligence.

As a further check, selected colleges may be given a quota for the shortlist: the number that a college can nominate to the shortlist may be fixed at the number of its students who were finally selected over the previous, say, four years. That will yield a shortlist four times the number to be recruited. That is a manageable number; it will provide good discrimination. Like the khoa test, it will force the colleges to send their very best without adulteration, or face the risk of having their quota reduced and even disqualified altogether.

Incidentally, when colleges are selected for their reputation, and allowed to contribute to the shortlist, it becomes crucial to gain admission to those prestigious colleges. If those colleges too make their selection by first selecting good schools and letting the schools contribute to the shortlist, selection gets pushed down still further — to an effective 11-plus system.

All this looks like multi-stage elitism. However, like the motion of the sun and the earth, what is obvious is not necessarily right. In truth, multi-level selection pushed down to younger ages is more egalitarian than the mass examination system we have at present.

This is 134th in the Vision 2020 series. The previous article was published on October 4.

(The author is a former Director of IIT Madras. Response may be sent to indresan@vsnl.com)

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