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BUREAUCRACY:
RECRUITMENT
Enter
The New Babu
Shed
that Mai Baap image-that's what recruits to the civil service are being
told. This elite core of administrators is undergoing a serious phase
of transition and role definition.
By
Vijay Jung Thapa
It's
almost as if Kripa Shankar Yadav wears a bright neon sign on his chest
that repeatedly blinks out his "villager" status. Within moments
of meeting him, you're given a list of essential autobiographical facts.
He comes from Barbaspur-a nondescript village in Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh.
His father is a marginal farmer who took up a part-time job at the local
liquor outlet so that he had money for his children's education. Yadav's
ambition-until he got a college education, the only one in the family
to get that far-was to become a truck driver. Because, in his locality
the drivers always had the best-looking concrete houses. And he was certain
that the two rural constants that he saw around him-poverty and hopelessness-would
always be a post of his life.
 |
| Kripa
Shankar Yadav from Uttar Pradesh and YAmuna Devi from Tamil Nadu are
typical of the increasingly non-urban face of the civil service |
Okay, fast
forward to the present and ask Yadav what's changed about the past. "Today
in my village I have the status of a demi-god," he says looking you
in the eye. "No one from my community has ever got into the civil
services."
Yadav is
undergoing a year-long foundation training course at the Lal Bahadur Shastri
National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA) in Mussoorie after which he
will join the elite cadres of the civilian bureaucracy. Even here, he
doesn't just wear his "villager badge" on his sleeve. No, he
waves it with a flourish, like a matador handling a red capote. "It's
a rural thing," he says in chaste Hindi. "Villagers have always
had to assert themselves. I do that a lot here."
He has ensured
that all course material given during training comes in Hindi too. He
has urged the administration in the academy to consider, for the first
time, English tuition for probationers who aren't comfortable with the
language. And very frequently he pooh poohs the academy's approach to
village-based development projects. "Sometimes I feel they have no
idea what people in the village want," he says rolling his eyes.
"In many ways the civil service is still a relic of the Raj."
Well, that's
one way of looking at it. But take a quick poll among retired IAS, IPS
and ifs officers and you are likely to come up with a more indignant and
contrarian view of how the quality of civil service probationers is being
diluted because of a marked social alteration in the kind of people coming
in. But that isn't all. Fact is, today the elite core of administrators
in this country, the civil service-what was once called the steel frame
of India-is going through a serious phase of transition in its identity
and role definition. The most pressing reasons:
The profession
doesn't hold the same kind of strong primal attraction, with the more
talented students either preferring to go abroad or opting for the more
lucrative private sector.
Political
interference in the services has taken a toll leading to a growing feeling
of cynicism in the cadres.
There is
today a discernible dropout rate-something unheard of earlier-with the
abler administrators opting for better jobs elsewhere.
The credibility
of the civil service is at an all-time low.
A consensus
paper on "civil service reforms" drawn up by the LBSNAA puts
it more candidly: "Whatever went wrong in the four decades of planned
development is attributed to it (the civil service) and whatever worked
was in spite of it. Civil-service baiting today has acquired an acrimony
as never before and it is condemned not only from without but also from
within."
There isn't
a doubt that the social composition of civil service officers is different
and far more representative in some ways. The earlier urban bias in selection
is now steadily declining (see graph). Similarly, there is also a change
in the campuses where officers are coming from. Even as late as 1980,
the main contributors to the civil service were St Stephens' College and
Hindu College in Delhi, Presidency College in Calcutta, Muir Hostel in
Allahabad, Loyola, Madras Christian and Presidency Colleges in Chennai
and Ravenshaw College in Cuttack. Today, the largest contingent comes
from IIT Kanpur.
How has
this really affected the service? Typically, there are two strong opposing
views. The more critical view is that the civil service-meant to attract
generalists with a liberal arts background and a commitment to public
service-is now being flooded with people whose technical training has
insulated them from social and political realities. Also, while greater
rural representation is a good idea, what is actually happening is that
a majority of probationers seem to come from a handful of backward states-Uttar
Pradesh and Bihar are good examples-where due to the lack of a flourishing
private sector, the civil service is still considered the "mother
of all jobs". Adds a senior bureaucrat: "A lot of these probationers
come from feudal backgrounds and are only interested in power and money.
They have set ideas that are conservative, parochial, casteist and communal."
But the
other view, represented by a wider cross-section of bureaucrats is that
the changing social profile of the new recruits is better for the civil
service because it gives it a more pan-Indian character. "The young
recruits I come across are well informed about issues than we ever were,"
says Wajahat Habibullah, director of LBSNAA. This view strongly denies
any connection between the decline of the service and the social background
of the recruits. "Look at how the bureaucracy is viewed by the public
today. They are seen as corrupt, communal and parochial ... and then ask
yourselves who has been running the bureaucracy till very recently, isn't
it people from the same elite, liberal, upper-class families?" asks
a former cabinet secretary. Besides, point out senior bureaucrats, if
money is the only consideration, in today's scenario a person who has
the intellectual capability to get through the civil services examination
has a lot of other lucrative job opportunities. "The majority of
those who get into the services today make a conscious choice," points
out Tarun Sikdar, deputy director at the LBSNAA.
But if alteration
in social composition isn't a major problem, role definition-or the process
of evolution to churn out a new model bureaucrat for these changing times-is
getting to be one. The LBSNAA itself is a good example of this churning.
Once regarded as just a finishing school where recruits were groomed in
table manners, today the academy is gearing itself to become a think tank
for the civil service. One of its main concerns is defining the role of
an officer seen through two main paradigms of change:
The irreversibility
of reforms and the fact that the government now broadly needs to confine
itself to the social sector, leaving the rest to market forces.
Decentralisation,
or the advent of a strong panchayati raj system that at the local level
takes away a lot of responsibilities earlier vested with the bureaucracy.
"Looking
at it through these two paradigms, what we tell the new recruits is the
mai-baap days of the bureaucracy are over. Today you are more like a facilitator,"
explains B.S. Baswan, former director of LBSNAA and secretary, minorities
commission. The new bureaucrat is seen as a "knowledge manager"-a
modern-day troubleshooter who takes decisions after consulting every interest
group, not autocratically as is being done today.
Moreover,
the recruits are told to start specialising in the micro-management level
(read district) so once they reach the macro-management level (policy
drafting) they know what streams they should follow in the hierarchy.
"No more should a defence secretary become an agriculture secretary,
or a finance secretary become an aviation secretary. The generalist is
no longer a viable concept," adds Sanjeev Chopra, deputy director
and faculty member at the LBSNAA.
But both
Baswan and Chopra admit they are taking on a very powerful mindset, one
that is steeped in tradition dating back to the Raj. lbsnaa faculty say
most recruits accept this change in attitude while in training, but change
their views once they get a district posting. It's called the "white
car, red light" syndrome-once they've tasted power, it isn't easy
to tell them they have to give it all up just because some "ivory
tower idealists" in Mussoorie say so. "There is suddenly a lot
of resentment especially directed against the seniors who have enjoyed
their stint of power but deny us ours," says a young IPS superintendent
of police. Adds N.C. Saxena, secretary, Planning Commission, a strong
advocate of reform in the civil service: "It's precisely this kind
of mindset that alienates the bureaucracy from the public."
And the
thinking today is that this mai baap mindset has to be weeded out right
in the beginning. It is at this point where the Union Public Service Commission
(UPSC), the organisation that selects the civil service probationers,
plays a vital role. For the first time ever, the UPSC is trying to change
the profile and personality of the civil servant. Says its chairperson
Lt-General (retd) Surrinder Nath: "There is a realisation that at
this juncture we need candidates with the necessary intellectual and attitudinal
calibre who can be facilitators, disseminators of information and agents
of change." The UPSC set up a nine-member committee headed by Planning
Commission member Y.K. Alagh in July to review the civil service examination
process. Experts in the UPSC say they are aware of the widespread criticism
of the examination process. The complaints are that only students with
rote ability clear the entrance examination, and the age limit-30 in the
general category, 33 for OBCs and 35 for SCs/STs-is too high, bringing
in people with firm mindsets that are difficult to change. Typically,
the student who clears the UPSC examination is one who has, after college,
opted out of the mainstream, is taking up coaching classes, and keeps
trying for years on end until one day he actually does get in.
Nath stressed
that the new committee would look into both factors. Alagh, when contacted,
was candid enough to say that the core issue his committee would be addressing
is how to get civil servants with a vision of the society they want to
build. He said the initial investigation by the committee revealed there
is a need to develop selection techniques that could identify "personality
types" most suited for leadership. Also in the offing could be psychological
tests. "We don't want to end up with people who hate numbers landing
up in the accounts service and others who hate physical activity ending
up in the police service," says Alagh.
But in the
end, all these efforts to try and define a "new babu" will come
to nothing if it isn't taken seriously by the existing bureaucracy itself.
As of now, most officers in the service look at this new trend with scepticism-and
often ridicule the probationers and their new-fangled ideas during their
first district posting. Says one such probationer: "The seniors try
and wear you down. It's a fight from the beginning." Who wins this
battle will eventually decide the fate of the civil service.
-with
Shuchi Sinha
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