An appeal that I would like the PMO to act on..... India has been administered through a cadre of officers in a manner that has broadly remained unchanged for nearly 150 years. It is a unique system that we inherited from our imperial bosses and built upon with very few changes in the overall concept of identifying individuals with high level of general intelligence (through a vigorous exam) and engaging them to run a hierarchically organized statutorily empowered administrative-structure. This system has worked fairly well in achieving its primary objective of engaging intelligent and articulated persons in public administration, but has not worked very well in dealing with the emerging and rapidly changing demands of administration in modern technocratic environment. If we look at the cadre structure, it is a lopsided mix of partially empowered specialized services like foreign, revenue, police, forest, railways, post etc. on one hand and a supremely empowered but completely generalized cadre of IAS on the other. If we look at the history of IAS service, it is clear that it emerged in a colonial environment with need of controlling subjects of the imperial rulers in a very broad and general way as the primary objective of the service; and hence, it required very few specialized skills beyond a sound and intelligent mind that can understand issues in a very basic way and resolve them. It was predominantly a service with purely administrative objectives. It is highly unfortunate that we never evolved this (very good) concept to match it with the changing demands of modern state-functioning. This resulted in a extremely generalized cadre running public enterprises or forming public policies in an environment where specialization is a key requirement. With passage of time, it is becoming abundantly clear that state functions are far too complex for a generalist to understand, and when this phenomenon is compounded with transferable nature of appointments, it is often leading to administrative mess and huge losses to exchequer due to bad decisions taken due to ignorance in sector-specific issues. It is important that this issue is address with due seriousness by the PMO, as it is one of the biggest step required for better administration that this nation desperately needs. The primary move could be in terms of division of the cadre into ministry-based specializations. It is a concept that is already existing (eg. most other cadres) and has worked well due to generalists learning and acquiring specialized skills while rising up in the system. A similar formation of power, telecome, mining, health etc. services will ensure that specialized knowledge and career objectives become part of administration. Apart from creation of other services (and division of general administration), there is a strong need of removal of the IAS as the supreme authority that is placed above all services at this point of time. When an ACS (forest and environment) acts as a final authority with no specialized knowledge of the sector over hundreds of Indian Forest Service officers with years of sector-specific experience (and often seniority), it becomes an absurd proposition to accept and it demotivates the subordinate cadre. With generalized administration replaced by technocratic specialists, we will also be able to engage technical intelligence that is available in IITS and IIMS of India (that is currently exploited by others) in public administration. There will be lot more career opportunities for people with specialized abilities and there will also be an inclination to improve knowledge base. It will be a simple but effective reform that needs consideration of the PMO.
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 08:14:07 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015