The Hindu Business Line : Making civil services citizen-centric

A clarion call from the Prime Minister for engineering reforms in the Indian Civil Services was the screaming headlines last week. Read in the context of such pronouncements in the past decade or so, they ring hollow. And it is a brave statement, coming as it does from a Prime Minister heading a coalition government.

Need for reforms

Ever since the Fifth Pay Commission's report in 1997 introduced the euphemistic and, perhaps, fashionable terms such as `enablers' and `facilitators' to replace the un-edifying `inspectors' and `controllers' to herald changes in the attitude of administrators, it has become customary to for political masters to mouth these shibboleths whenever they address gatherings where the subject matter is public administration.

No transformation

It is almost three years since the second Administrative Reforms Commission was constituted and, yet, there have been no transformation in the civil services. This is not to take away the credit due to the Administrative Reforms Commission in incorporating the Right To Information in the fabric of administrative procedures.

Of enablers and facilitators

Although reconstituting the civil service and making it citizen-centric was a major, if not the central, task given to the Commission, it appears not being able to make much headway. Can, then, the civil service be transformed in the near future?

Not only will the present incumbents oppose change tooth and nail but vested interests, even among the political classes, will resist them. If the politics of governance is stymied by the politician-criminal nexus, the practice of administration is stifled by the politician-bureaucrat partnership.

Ironically, the civil service structure seems to have enough `enablers' and `facilitators' who help the political class.

Handling bureaucracy

Just to illustrate how difficult it is to handle the bureaucratic set up, one can review the implementation of the Expenditure Reforms Commission, set up almost a decade ago.

One can still see departments of the controller-inspector raj remaining in place, merely by scanning the official telephone directory.

As a matter of fact, not only is the civil service loath to transform, its members do not even seem to take kindly to attempts by the government to send them on training or refresher courses, if they are held within India.

Obviously, this is what has driven the government to sign agreements with American universities, such as Harvard, to train top officials with 24-28 years of experience.

Apart from perhaps the irrepressible observation about the inverse correlation between uptake and age profile of the potential trainees, is it not paradoxical that we should be pointing to China as the paradigm for development and relentless growth, but sending our bureaucrats, who should be enablers and facilitators of even faster growth than China, in the wrong direction?

(The author is former Member, Ordnance Factories, Ministry of Defence.)

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