Designing signposts for a road to nowhere

Trust bureaucrats to muster all the gobbledygook they are capable of to make utterly plain and simple things obtuse, obfuscatory and complicated!

If the Performance Management Division of the Cabinet Secretariat had set before itself the aim of wasting everybody's time in the 80 departments and ministries of the Centre and tying them into knots in the bargain, it could not have done better than putting out the viscous mass of 15 pages going by the interminably long title “Guidelines for Designing Results-Framework Document for Responsibility Centres”.

This is the agonisingly laboured response of the Cabinet Secretariat to the directive of the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, issued more than two years ago, on September 11, 2009, to be exact, to prepare a “Performance Monitoring and Evaluation System (PMES) for Government Departments”.

For three years previously, there was a system requiring the ministries/departments to submit Performance Appraisal Reports (PARs). These, in turn, were an outgrowth of the Outlay-Outcome statements conceived by Mr P. Chidambaram, when he was the Finance Minister, as part of the annual Budget.

CONVOLUTED AND CONFUSING

It would seem from a report of the Secretary (Performance Management) located in the Cabinet Secretariat that there was “widespread dissatisfaction with the working of the PAR system at all levels in the Government”. It was found lacking in objectivity and quantified and quantifiable parameters, and ended up rating every officer as excellent (which perhaps was its original intention!)

The remedy now proposed by the Cabinet Secretariat prescribing a monstrously convoluted and confusing Results-Framework Document (RFD) is many times worse than the disease.

It will be, on the one hand “a record of understanding between a Department/Ministry representing the people's mandate, and the Head of the organisation and, on the other, a similar record of understanding between the parent Ministry/Department and the Responsibility Centre responsible for implementing this mandate.” The attached and subordinate offices and autonomous organisations under the ministry/department will all be called ‘Responsibility Centres' reminiscent of the stale, old concept of ‘profit centres'.

It will set out in six separate sections the ministry's vision, mission, objectives and functions; inter se priorities among key objectives, success indicators and targets; trend values of the success indicators; description and definition of success indicators and proposed measurement methodology; specific performance requirements from other departments that are critical for delivering agreed results; outcome/impact of activities of the ministry or the department.

HORTATORY SERMONS

It begs several questions: Why should there be any records of agreement as if the ministries/departments are entering into some international treaties? As per the Guidelines, the whole onus is on the Responsibility Centres to perform; what about the heads of ministries/departments who often are the biggest bottlenecks? What is the sense in leaving the task of working out the nature, scale and scope of success indicators, measurement methodology and performance parameters to the ministries/departments, whereas it is squarely for the Cabinet Secretariat to do so, if the yardsticks are to be uniform and achievements comparable? How will functional autonomy and freedom from political interference be guaranteed?

The Cabinet Secretariat mandarins cannot resist the temptation of embarking on long-winded, hortatory sermons on matters that are familiar ground. For instance, there is an exhausting definition of a ‘good vision statement'. Just savour this: It should be easy to read and understand; compact and crisp; meaningful and not too open ended and far-fetched; exciting to people and energising them; and achievable and at the same time challenging and compelling. It should leave something to people's imagination and specify the destination and not delineate the road-map. It should also serve as a motivating force even in hard times and stretch everyone involved in the exercise beyond what is comfortable.

Ironically, these are the very features that are conspicuously absent from the ponderous Cabinet Secretariat paper laying down the Guidelines for designing the RFD. In its present form, it is a road to nowhere, for it is totally unintelligible, impractical and unenforceable.

The Prime Minister should ask the Cabinet Secretariat to scratch it straightaway and come up with a neat and tidy document of not more than five pages mentioning the criteria and benchmarks, and the manner of measuring them, couched in very simple language.

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