PRIVATISING THE IAS IS A MISTAKE.

     The NITI ( National Institution for Transformation of India) Ayog has recommended to the Prime Minister that “lateral entry” from the private sector should be introduced in the civil services at all levels, from Secretary to Deputy Secretary. The PMO (Prime Minister's Office) is reportedly considering the matter seriously. A bunch of reemployed bureaucrats are seeking to undermine the vision of someone like Sardar Patel who had cautioned the Constituent Assembly that India would disintegrate if it did not have a strong and independent civil service.

    To be candid, the premier civil service of India, the IAS has not lived up to the Sardar’s expectations. It has, to an alarming degree, become politicised, slothful, complacent, venal and self serving. But that is not the whole story: the IAS has also delivered significant results in terms of quality of life indicators, human welfare index, the economy, preserving federalism, developing basic infrastructure, reducing poverty. Its officers are still chosen by the most rigorous, objective and fair selection process in the country. If it has faltered this is primarily due to the deteriorating quality of the political executive, particularly after Mrs. Gandhi’s Emergency and its credo of a “committed bureaucracy.” It has not been allowed the independence and the freedom to “speak out its advice” which Sardar Patel had stipulated as an essential condition for its effectiveness. Political governments have used the tools of postings, transfers, reemployment, charge-sheets, and of late tickets to elections, to subvert, entice, and intimidate the members of the service to conform. That it still functions most of the time is a tribute to its resilience, selection and relevance.

   But instead of attending to the problems mentioned above (which have been flagged time and again by various Administrative Reforms Commissions and Expert Committees) the government is , as usual, opting for a quick-fix which will further erode the efficiency of the IAS and destroy for ever its special character. The ostensible reason being trotted out is that the IAS lacks domain knowledge in a fast evolving, technology driven world, and hence “ domain experts” from the private sector need to be inducted laterally to make it a modern institution. This is specious and mischievous too, as I will explain in a moment.

    The word “domain” here is synonymous with “technical”, meaning that the  IAS needs technically qualified people from the outside. Not true. It already has enough. In the 2017 batch itself out of 264 selected candidates , 118 ( 44.69%) are from an engineering background; if one adds on the Doctors , IT graduates etc. the percentage comes closer to 50. Among the 20 toppers in this batch, 19 are engineers and one is a doctor! There is enough technical expertise in the IAS and this is no reason to get more from the private sector.

   Secondly, the “domain” argument is misleading sophistry and betrays a complete lack of understanding of what the role of a permanent civil service in a democracy should be. The civil servant is not required to be a technical expert. He stands at the point where technology intersects with the development needs of the common man, which can vary from village to village. There can be no one size fits all solutions, no matter how good the technology, as both demonetisation and GST have recently demonstrated. The civil servant’s role is that of the synthesiser- to assimilate a technology or idea, adapt it to the local context, and then extend it to the hundreds of millions, making mid course corrections wherever required. The limited, one dimensional vision that technocrats have would make them unsuitable for this role.

    To fulfil this role an officer needs to have deep grass roots experience, and an IAS officer is uniquely qualified for this. On an average he spends the first ten years of his career in “the field”, getting to know the dynamics of the actual workings of government at the village, panchayat, tehsil and district level. This is an invaluable input for him when he moves on to the Secretariat or Delhi to a policy making level, and one that any lateral entry recruit would completely lack.

    In government nothing is purely technical. Take, for instance, the construction of a dam, which the proponents of lateral entry would regard as a job for a domain  (engineering) expert. It is much, much more for it involves areas an engineer would have no clue about: acquisition of land, resettlement and rehabilitation of oustees, diversion of forest areas, preparation of Environmental Impact  and Social Impact Assessments, formulation and implementation of Environmental Management Plans, financial closure for the project, negotiating PPPs with the buyers, etc. Building the dam is only a small part of the project. It is here that the IAS officer’s role as a coordinator becomes indispensable: he has typically worked in a dozen different departments, his knowledge of administration is both deep and eclectic, he does not exist in a silo like all domain experts do. He is supremely qualified to coordinate the functioning of a government that works through a hundred Ministries at the Centre and in the states.

     An IAS officer IS a domain expert, in the most difficult and complex of all domains- Public Administration, which is a witch’s brew of policies, demographics, politics, social imperatives, religion, law and order. He is an expert at balancing all these, sometimes contradictory elements, and still moving the nation forward. A private sector whizz kid, whose only focus has been on maximising of profit, can never understand the dynamics involved or get the balance right.

    Lateral entry will be a regressive move towards the spoils system, which is perhaps why the government is keen on it. It will give it the freedom to appoint loyalists, fellow travelers, favourites and ideological compatibles. But these birds of passage will have no stakes in the service. In one generation there shall be no permanent civil service left. The PPP (Public Private Partnership) model may work for commercial projects, but a permanent civil service cannot function on this model. Government should instead address urgently the issues highlighted above. By all means throw out the bath-water, maybe even a baby or two, but for God’s sake don’t discard the bath-tub itself!