XVII

Civil Service Reforms in India

S. Narayan

The existing structure of the civil services in India owes much to the pattern of administration that the colonial rulers introduced into this country. The process of securing control over the entire geography of India, which included the areas now in Pakistan and Bangladesh, took over a hundred years. There were also subsequent annexations of Sri Lanka and Burma (now Myanmar) and even Malaysia into this empire, though the administration in those areas was managed somewhat differently.

Pre-Independence

In the Indian Subcontinent, the concern of the colonial administration was the extraction of revenue. Since the structure of the economy was substantially agrarian, it meant getting it from revenues on land. In the presidency areas of Madras, Bombay and Bengal, the introduction of permanent settlement¹ ensured the settlement of land to the owners, rates of levy on the land as well as introduction of a machinery to collect revenues. The colonial rulers drew substantially on the experiences of the Mughals and the Muslim rulers who had come before them. Hence, rates of land revenue were fixed on criteria that had been adopted for hundreds of years. At the same time, the administration recognized the existence of large landholders and zamindars, as well as minor and major princely states that had their own systems of revenue collection. In areas not settled by the ryotwari² system, the collection of revenues was a tax on the landowner, and the zamindar or the prince was expected to hand over a portion of the revenues to the rulers.

The administrative and civil services structure grew out of these considerations of governance. In areas where the government was administering the ryotwari system, it was necessary to have an elaborate set of records for landholdings, land transfers and ownerships, birth and death data as well as an annual record of crops cultivated, conditions of the crops and yield, revenues due and collectible, and accounts for collection. This ensured the development of a hierarchy of officialdom that started at the village level with the village accountant and headman, through supervising hierarchies at different levels, to the administrative unit of a district, which was headed by a district collector, really the kingpin of the administration at that time. He was not only responsible for the collection of revenues, but also for the settlement of disputes, and as a magistrate, for awarding punishments. The responsibility of maintaining law and order lay with him, and in all respects, he was the eyes and ears of the colonial rulers.

In the zamindari areas and in the administered princely states, the role of the colonial administration was reduced to the extent that the revenue amounts, predetermined, were the responsibility of the owner. Hence, at the detailed village level the account-keeping machinery was not required to the extent it was required in ryotwari areas. Law and order, and settlement of disputes lay with the prince, who had his own administrative hierarchy.

The colonial system envisaged an overarching secretariat in Delhi (after it moved there from Calcutta), at the peak of which was the Viceroy, assisted by members in council. Most importantly, the administration in the presidency areas was through a governor, who had all the executive powers, until the Montague–Chelmsford reforms ushered in a period of provincially elected legislatures answerable to the governor.

After 1947

After Independence in 1947, the system of administration remained very similar to that before, with the addition that a similar pattern was introduced in all the states. The introduction of the Indian Civil Service personnel through a series of competitive examinations (in the Gladstone era) introduced a hierarchy of English-educated, committed set of civil servants into the administration who rose through ranks in the districts as sub-divisional officers, to district collectors, and eventually to positions of policymaking in the provincial and the Central government. After Independence, the civil service became the administrative service, and was supported by the police service, recruited through similar competitive examinations. The rights and privileges of the persons admitted to these services were included in articles 309 to 311 of the Constitution, and even the removal of these persons was protected by due process in the Constitution.

These new entrants occupy the highest levels of the civil services, manning almost all departments in the secretariats at the state as well as the Central government.

Broadly, the structure of the administration of civil services has remained the same for the last seventy years, though some regional variations have been introduced over the last seven decades. The problems that have arisen have primarily been due to the fact that much in India has changed.

First, and most importantly, the introduction of democratically elected legislators at the state and Central level resulted in direct accountability of these legislators to the voters and public at large. At a fundamental level, there was the district administration, primarily responsible for maintaining law and order, and administering according to set processes and regulations. And then there was the aspirant legislator, keen on providing development and amenities for this electorate. The morphing of the colonial district collector into a development administrator has had mixed success, as the political hierarchy increasingly felt emboldened to step into the realm of administration through requests, demands, and sometimes pressure. There was, and is, nothing in the system to prescribe coping mechanisms, and even today, the conflict between the politician and the administrator, especially at regional levels, is the subject of regular news.

Second, the role of the Central government and also the state governments changed substantially. No longer were the final arbiters in faraway London; and important fiscal, monetary, foreign policy, security and development decisions had to be taken at the government level, either by the Centre or in the states. There was also the cabinet of ministers and sectoral hierarchies of departments and their staffing as well as parliamentary accountability and requirements of legislative oversight. Suddenly, the remit of responsibilities of the civil services expanded. At the same time, the processes of decision-making remained mired in the 1900s. Files would originate at the lower levels of the bureaucracy and would meander upwards for decision.

Lord Curzon, Viceroy, in a note in August 1899 gives an example:

I will give, before passing on, an illustration of the prolixity of the existing system. A Despatch from Secretary of State arrived in one of the Departments of the Government of India in my predecessor’s time. It covered three and a half pages of print. After being somewhat gingerly touched by a few clerks, it was taken in hand by an Under Secretary who paraphrased it in one and a half pages of print and then added a Note recording his own opinion in four and a half additional pages of print. This brave example was eagerly followed by his colleagues in an ascending scale; and by the time the Viceroy and Members of Council had noted on it, the recorded Notes amounted to 28 pages of small print, as compared with the three and a half pages of large print from the Secretary of State that had provoked this lamentable effusion. I need hardly add that no final decision was arrived at, and the case was left over to me for settlement.³

Such processes exist even today, holding up the decision-making process. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expressed his unhappiness publicly on several occasions over the slow process of decision-making as well as the process rather than the output-oriented culture of administration.

Third, there has arisen considerable difference in the way that administrative processes in the states operate. This has led to the erosion of the processes. In the structure that has been followed since colonial times, decision-making has been based on documented reasoning, which originate in departments, then referred to others for comments, and finally decisions arrived at after a detailed examination of the issues involved. In several states, the regional parties in power have dispensed with systems, and decision-making is often top-down, ad-hoc and sometimes without examining the issues in detail. Such processes lead to later complaints as well as attempts at corrections. The ascendancy of regional parties, as well as the constant change between parties of differing ideologies in certain states, have resulted in the administration turning cautious in taking sensitive decisions, for fear of being found fault with by a succeeding administration.

Reforms

It is evident that the processes and procedures as well as the structure of the administration and the personnel who are manning it require a change of approach and mindset. It is interesting that civil service reforms have been attempted continuously by governments in India, and there have been close to fifty committees that have looked at administrative reforms and given their recommendations, starting in 1952. There have been recommendations that have focused on approaches to recruitment, measuring performance, accountability and ethics. There have also been recommendations that have highlighted the needs to build capacity, enhance accountability, competence, performance, and to recognize and reward leadership and performance. The first Administrative Reforms Commission, appointed in 1966, focused on dealing with public grievances, planning, personnel, Centre-state relations and the machinery of the Government of India and other procedures. The second Administrative Reforms Commission, appointed in 2005, gave its report in 2009 and included chapters on ethics, local governments, handling terrorism, right to information, e-governance and the organizational structure of the government. Suggestions include changes in the personnel procedures, in policy implementation and performance-based assessment.

The NITI Aayog has been quite vocal in demanding changes. ‘It is not feasible for India to progress through the twenty-first century with nineteenth century administrative systems.’⁴ The NITI Aayog has strongly recommended lateral induction into civil services at higher levels, of persons who are professionally qualified and bring a larger world experience to the government. There have been recent placements, even at higher levels of the bureaucracy, in pursuit of these policies.

The core question in the issue of civil service reforms appears to be whether the civil services as they are constituted, and indeed the systems and procedures within which they work, are suited to current-day expectations and needs. There are several aspects to be considered here.

To start with, there is now a clear difference between the levels of services expected at the state level and the Central level. There is a distinct difference between the two. At the state level, the civil services are substantially engaged in providing services, including health, public distribution of foodgrains, and education. The state government is also responsible for infrastructure, including roads, electricity and the provision of water supply, both for private use as well as for industry. It is responsible for a large number of services in urban areas that include water supply, sewage treatment and waste removal, and the maintenance of roads and street lights. It is also responsible for law and order and security, as well as for the collection of state revenues, most importantly the GST.

After the liberalization of industrial licencing and the opening up of the economy, the role of the state governments in industrialization has now moved to providing an attractive location for investment through provision of facilities, infrastructure and fiscal concessions, and not with setting up industry or finance corporations or setting up public sector units. Overall, the state administration has matured into a service delivery unit, and it is evident from policy pronouncements from state governments at the time of budget making, that they are mostly incremental additions to existing programmes.

In this scenario, the civil services should be focusing on efficiency and effectiveness of delivery and public satisfaction at all levels. The political hierarchy would also expect that the services expected by the public are being delivered regularly and efficiently. This requires an efficient, accountable and professional administration that is able to manage the departmental hierarchy in a manner that delivers these results. There are very few areas where innovative thinking or policymaking is required: perhaps in the area of infrastructure, transportation or energy policy. The structure of the civil service at the state level would, therefore, have to be different from that at the Central level. There is little need for brilliance or for tall trees. The services portfolio has matured and just needs to be delivered and improved upon, day after day.

The picture is somewhat different at the Central level. After the abolition of the Planning Commission, the closing of several centrally sponsored schemes and the enhancement in the devolution of share of total revenues to the states, the Central government has lesser responsibility for implementation than the states. Even the national programmes of Swachh Bharat, Smart Cities, food security, rojgar yojna are to be implemented at the state or sub-state levels.

The responsibility for the Central government lies in the conceptualization of these pan-India schemes, providing body and flesh to the programmes, and ensuring an enabling and facilitating environment for these programmes to work: in short, to conceptualize, detail and monitor national schemes. There are also departments of the Central government that are involved with areas beyond the remit of the state governments, most importantly defence, atomic energy and space, foreign policy, energy, including petroleum and coal, civil aviation, railways and shipping, finance and financial markets and exchanges as well as collection of direct and indirect taxes. It is clear from this list that each one requires domain knowledge for formulating and implementing policies and strategies, and that inadequate professional knowledge would be a dampener. Most importantly, it is evident that service in the state or in the district as a collector will in no way help the person concerned to acquire this expertise or experience.

If this argument is accepted, then there is a clear need to separate the higher administration of the civil services into two categories—those that are involved at the state level and those at the Central level. The Indian Administrative Service personnel, coming from public service delivery experience at the state level, should no longer be expected to perform the specific policy and strategic tasks at the Central level. This fact is already being recognized at the levels of state administration. State governments prefer to post local officers promoted to the IAS as district collectors and also in important development departments that interact with the public on services delivery. One chief minister remarked a few years ago that he could run the state without the IAS.⁵

At the same time, the talent pool of the IAS needs to be nurtured into specialization of specific sectoral expertise that include intimate professional knowledge of these areas. Coupled with continuous tenure of postings in a particular department, as is the practice in most developed countries like Japan, the UK and even the US, it is is bound to prove more impactful. It also follows that at the Central level, these ministries need to have domain knowledge experts at senior levels. There is no need, for example, for the defence secretary to be an IAS appointee.

The IAS, as presently structured into a career option, seems to have outlived its usefulness. Perhaps the time has come to rethink the IAS into a state cadre that would remain in the state, and Central cadre that would spend a few years in the state, and then move to the Centre. The specialization of the latter would be decided at the time of recruitment so that the candidate knows where he/she would be spending the rest of his/her career.

All this does not take care of the Curzon issue, of the process of decision-making and filing. This is a structural issue and Curzon notes:

In Great Britain the offices of the Government are manned from top to bottom by clerks or Secretaries, all of whom have passed a severe and often special competitive examination, whose life service will be devoted to the department, and who acquire early and carry with them through their careers the traditions and a great deal of the unwritten knowledge of the office. Here the case is widely different. The lower grades of the departments are filled with non-gazetted officers of a class and attainment not comparable with those of the corresponding ranks in the English offices.

The process of decision-making, therefore, passes through several layers of different understandings and capabilities, before arriving at the highest levels. One of the important suggestions made in several administrative reform recommendations is the need for a department to speak with one voice—there cannot be views that differ at each level. The proposal needs to be debated within the department and a single view arrived at conveyed. This would require two steps, one for making sure that the record of discussions within the department are kept accurately and faithfully, and two, for reducing the clerical and other categories in the secretariat. More explicitly, while it would make sense at the state level, where specific programmes are implemented, to have a significant implementing, monitoring and review machinery manned at different levels with different skills, it would hardly be appropriate to consider this mechanism as relevant for deciding whether to launch a manned mission to the moon.

The suggestion above requires a serious revision of the manual of secretariat procedures that has been in vogue at the Central secretariat level for over a hundred years, and to replace it with a more decision-oriented system, where, focus shifts to outcomes that can be reviewed and monitored, if necessary, even by the prime minister.

There is an opportunity to move forward from the current manual filing system through various clerical levels and to introduce a more technology-based e-filing system that would be much more officer- and decision-oriented. An attempt has been made in the new secretariat at Amravati in Andhra Pradesh and decisions are all recorded on e-files. Now that the GST is in place, it should be possible to integrate the entire revenue collection services at different levels into a single platform.

Increasing urbanization has led to a large pressure on public services delivered at the city administration level. This includes water, removal of waste and sewerage, as well as roads and electricity. Even after the Constitutional amendments empowering local bodies, systems are not in place in many states. The problem appears to be a lack of adequate professional capacity to deliver these services. Some of the cities are larger than Singapore or Dubai, and yet the technical staff is not of that quality. As the country urbanizes, skilling of technical personnel at the level of local bodies will emerge as a major challenge.

A final point is about the recruitment, training and evaluation of the civil services. There are many useful recommendations in the administrative reform committees’ reports that speak about building capacity, enhancing accountability and of performance-oriented assessment. It is a pity that many of these recommendations, extremely sound in nature, have not been implemented. The current government at the Centre, concerned as it is with performance and delivery, is well placed to make these changes happen.