Bureaucrats versus the experts

BJP general secretary Pramod Mahajan has lamented that the bureaucracy in India is unaccountable.

To prove his point, he has cited how the same bureaucrats have been defending almost every Budget presented in the last decade, although different governments led by different political parties produced them.

This is possible only when bureaucrats are not accountable.

Mahajan's argument is that bureaucrats are permanent employees of the government.

Politicians in power are not permanent. They have to get elected every five years or even less. While politicians are accountable to the people of this country, bureaucrats are not.

That's why bureaucrats can function irresponsibly and yet get away with it. But politicians cannot, because they have to face the electorate every five years.

It is not clear what alternatives Mahajan has in his mind. Is he talking about committed bureaucracy at the top, which changes whenever a new government is elected?

It is true that a committed bureaucracy is not permanent.

It is accountable to the ministers or the prime minister, who in turn is accountable to the people.

Thus, Pramod Mahajan as a minister can appoint a person of his choice as secretary of his ministry. He will not have to settle for an IAS officer already shortlisted by the Cabinet secretariat on the panel and bother about his seniority.

On paper, Mahajan's arguments seem to be fine. Why should a minister not have a free hand in choosing the secretary of the ministry or the department he is heading?

And why shouldn't the secretary's tenure be co-terminous with that of the minister? In fact, the secretary's tenure need not be co-terminous with that of the minister.

All that committed bureaucracy seeks to achieve is that every minister should have the freedom to get a secretary (of his ministry) of his own choice, provided the person meets the basic criteria for such selection.

In India, the ministers have never been given the full freedom to choose their secretaries and senior officials. There is a panel of senior officials maintained by the Cabinet secretariat.

Criteria such as seniority, administrative skills, domain knowledge and track record are considered by the secretariat before they make their recommendations to the appointments committee of the Cabinet.

The minister is a member of this committee, along with the prime minister and the home minister. So, he has a say in the selection, but his choice is limited by the names that are put up before the Cabinet.

Committed bureaucracy will change all that. The range of choice for a secretary's job will be wider.

IAS officers will start worrying about their next posting and, more importantly, the next promotion.

Most IAS officers might not even reach the rank of secretary, since ministers might prefer experts from outside the service for those coveted jobs.

Opting for committed bureaucracy, therefore, is bound to face stiff resistance from the strong IAS lobby within government.

So, what should the government do? An easier option would be to introduce a bias in the selection process in favour of experts.

Over the years, the IAS system has built a strong network at various levels of administration. This has its advantages as also disadvantages.

But to dismantle that system in one stroke is neither possible nor advisable.

Thus, a more pragmatic approach would be to induct experts and professionals from outside the service at lateral levels and let the process for selecting the secretary be thrown open.

This will allow the Cabinet secretariat to consider the IAS officers and the experts in the service for the key secretarial jobs in different ministries.

In the late sixties and early seventies, Indira Gandhi had experimented with induction of experts and professionals from the private sector into government service. Many of those became secretaries in the several key ministries.

Wadud Khan, Mantosh Sondhi, V Krishnamurthy, Prahlad Basu and D V Kapur are among those experts who headed many key ministries at the Centre in the seventies and the eighties. In the late eighties and the nineties, the finance ministry was led by experts like Bimal Jalan and Montek Singh Ahluwalia.

Today, the decline in the quality of officers in IAS is a cause for concern.

The finance ministry has seen many finance secretaries in the last five years, but none of them came anywhere close to those experts who headed North Block in the late eighties and the early nineties.

With many secretaries in the finance ministry due for superannuation in the next few months, Finance Minister Jaswant Singh has the opportunity to rely on experts to head his ministry.

In the process, Mahajan's complaint that bureaucrats are not accountable would be redressed.

Hopefully, experts in the ministry would be more accountable and efficient than bureaucrats.

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