The canary in the coal mine

It is obvious to everyone that a central deputation to the Government of India Ministries is no longer as attractive to those in the Group-A civil services as it was just a couple of years ago.

Now senior civil servants — and not just from the IAS — are voting with their feet scurrying back to the relative safety of their States or the various Central Services they belong to.

This is surprising. When Narendra Modi came to power, he promised senior civil servants a fair-playing field and protection against arbitrary punishments. The unambiguous message was ‘be bold, take decisions and you will not come to grief’.

Taken in by such promise as well as by the grand scale of his victory in the general elections, Modi initially got unprecedented support from his senior civil servants.

They threw themselves with a passion into their jobs, even chatted about them in gushing terms on Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter groups. Initiatives such as Make in India suddenly seemed the Big Bang things that one could confidently go for to sign off otherwise boringly nondescript careers.

But well into Modi’s second year at the helm, the civil service across the board has lost the fleeting enthusiasm it showed initially, only to be replaced by a stall-do nothing wariness that characterised the last years of the UPA regime.

The canary so to speak is clearly fainting in the coalmine — a clear sign of loss of confidence in the government and a possible indication that it is best to jump ship without endangering oneself. Such are the self-preservation instincts of the civil services.

There is very little that any Prime Minister can do without bureaucratic support. Modi was doing fine so long as he had only clear goals in sight — for instance, improve India’s manufacturing capabilities, clean up the country, raise investor confidence and massively skill India’s young.

These are all great goals to pursue. But somewhere the message began to be diluted with doses of fundamentalist ideology creeping in.

There is the unedifying and perfectly avoidable on-going controversy over the appointment of Director of the Film and Television Institute of India, MHRD’s run-in with Anil Kakodkar over the selection of the Director for IIT Bombay, and choosing to highlight Good Governance on Christmas day merely because it happened to coincide with Vajpayee’s birthday.

These are draining the energy out of the massive mandate Modi almost singlehandedly conjured, making bureaucrats bolt.

Modi should take the signs of bureaucratic unease seriously and find ways to reverse the tide and restore officialdom’s morale quickly if the rest of his term is not going to be wasted.

Bureaucracies notoriously possess the remarkable capacity to batten down the hatches and wait it out.

Right now the only item that is engaging officials across the board over the past several months is the kind of package that the Seventh Pay Commission is likely to deliver.

Here, Modi clearly has an opportunity to wield the stick along with the proverbial carrot while reaffirming his commitment to see through the kind of reforms he promised during the elections without blatantly linking them to the ideological commitments of his party.

The civil service in India, of course, deserves the stick and a big one at that. It is one that has been very generously compensated after the Sixth Pay Commission and feathered its own nest ever since.

Modi will do well to see through a series of deep reforms that will completely overhaul it on a war footing within the next year or less leaving him just enough time to deliver on his many promises.

Since it is doubtful that the civil service will voluntarily undertake such a reform, Modi will do well to set up a National Civil Service Commission with a mandate to recommend as well as implement the kind of changes that will make it much more accountable and actually deliver.

For a start, such a Commission could put an immediate end to different wings of the civil service undermining each other while giving equal opportunity for the best in each to move up the ladder regardless of which service he or she belongs to.

Next, all current post retirement positions — members of the many central administrative tribunals, chairmanships of various regulatory agencies and so on — must be offered to run within one’s service life, ending in normal retirement, and selection to each must be through a much more transparent process than the current practice.

This should put an end to the continuous jockeying for post retirement assignments that senior bureaucrats queue up to get.

The present system is loaded against the honest silent class in bureaucracy that is either unwilling or unable to lobby and extend its official life with significantly added benefits thrown in.

Simultaneously, the government should take immediate steps to invest much more in training and frequently retraining its operative and supervisory cadres much better than it is doing so now. The higher civil service has done a very poor job in the country, investing much more in its own development in the best of institutions in India and overseas, while hardly caring for its subordinate formations.

Modi has just enough time to reform the civil service and he will be doing the country a big favour if he can bring it to heel and make it much less of a roadblock and much more of an enabler.

The carrot in the form of the 7th Pay Commission recommendations is in his hands and he should not give it away too cheaply and allow the bureaucracy to perpetrate an order that has long enabled it to sit heavily on the masses while being ever so generous to itself.

The writer is visiting Faculty at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

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