On 2 Sept 2020 the union cabinet approved a mega reform for the government employees based on the three pillars of governance, performance and accountability, entitled ‘Mission Karmayogi’. The reform seeks a shift from rules to roles, silos to coordination; inter disciplinary movements and continuous capacity building of the public servants. It hopes to transform the Civil Services to be citizen centric and capable of creating and delivering services conducive to economic growth and public welfare.
DoPT hopes to equip the civil servant, with domain and functional competencies, and also build behavioural competencies necessary to meet the challenges of the society. The reform hopes to align work allocation of civil servants by matching their competencies to the requirements of the post. DoPT hopes to put an appropriate monitoring and evaluation framework in place for performance evaluation.
A structure to implement the reform has also been envisaged. A committee headed by the Hon Prime Minister would be the advisory committee, a Capacity Building Commission, a Cabinet secretary Coordination Unit to monitor progress and a special purpose vehicle (SPV), a company, which will manage all the digital resources, and also create a marketplace for content for effective training of government employees.
Naresh Chandra Saxena says here:
Though India has done well where contractors are involved, such as road transport and power supply, India does poorly in all programmes that require active involvement of grassroots bureaucracy without contractors; whether it is the quality of education, immunisation, health care, maintenance of land records, supplementary nutrition through Anganwadi centres, groundwater management, crime control, and so on. Inclusive development must aim at economic growth with elimination of poverty, improvement in social indicators, and reduction in inequality as equally important goals, while ensuring at the same time that there is no damage to environment.
Only a robust governance mechanism would be able to ensure translating such policies into desired results. Many of our policies have looked good on paper and have remained on paper only. There is little doubt that this is on accounting of lacunae in governance. What are the lacunae? Does the administrative structure lack knowledge of the policy? Are they not trained in the mechanism of implementation? Is it lack of necessary infrastructure? Saxena has felt as here:
Unfortunately, governance in India at the state and district levels is quite weak, manifesting itself in poor service delivery, uncaring administration, corruption, and uncoordinated and wasteful public expenditure.
He has spoken of uncaring administration, corruption and uncoordinated and wasteful public expenditure. Can the Karmayogi program address these issues? Can it train officers to be more honest? Can it train officers to be sensitive? Can it do away with empire building attitudes of the Government machinery? To say the least, bringing such change in the system is a tall order. I feel that changing attitudes in a system that is hard and guided by rules is going to be very difficult.
Will the Karmayogi program inculcate the right values? Take the example of getting vigilance clearance for officers who have been selected for a given job. We see a flood of complaints about the officer before and after the selection process. Clearances are delayed and the officers are made to undergo suffering by having to answer the same issue repeatedly. All officers tend to develop an attitude of dodging responsibility. Since their progress is not evaluated based on outcomes of programs or their work, they tend to shirk from responsibilities and try to shift the issue in different directions. The incentive system promotes escapism, which I feel, cannot be corrected by training alone. The reform effort needs to be more comprehensive and should include reward for performance.
Gulzar has blogged about bureaucratic incentives and corruption here. The limited point I want to draw from his blog is:
There are two aspects of performance that are of relevance. One, performance in the Chinese case is measured in terms of positive contribution to regional economic growth. The metrics used to measure performance were reasonably credible measures of aggregate progress. This is important because there is a difference between cronyism that confers disproportionate privately shared benefits while inflicting significant net long-term social costs and one which shares around both private and social benefits. The later is net welfare enhancing.
I am not making a case for the Chinese system of incentives. I am making a case for a system where performance in terms of aggregate increase in welfare (Economic and Social) is rewarded in terms of upward mobility and higher responsibility.
In the India bureaucracy, promotion is based on seniority and ensuring that there is nothing adverse that can be said about the officer. Most officers find it easier to achieve by dodging difficult decisions and protecting themselves from criticism of any sort. Further, proximity to the Government in power ensures ‘good’ postings. This might appear cynical, but it contains a good bit of truth. I would go so far as to say that, there are many officers who are placed in important positions on account of their capacity to deliver. Such instances are however, not very common and getting rarer.
Saxena says:
Lant Pritchett has an interesting explanation for why things go so shockingly awry in India. He calls this the flailing state syndrome, 'a nation-state in which the head, that is elite institutions at the national (and in some states) level, remains sound and functional but that this head is no longer reliably connected via nerves and sinews to its own limbs.’
As Chidambaram put it, 'Civil servants design the projects and programmes, they make cost and time estimates, and they are directly responsible for implementation; yet, many programmes have failed completely and many others have yielded unsatisfactory results'. If the administrative processes can be streamlined, even routine administration with average leadership should suffice to produce results.
Saxena speaks of the political system also being responsible for failing administration.
Such backseat driving affords legislators informal control over the bureaucracy that promotes irresponsible decision-making and encourages corruption. The constitutional separation between the executive and the legislature has disappeared in India. This has resulted in erosion of internal discipline among civil servants.
I have no question about the inability of the administration to meet the needs of the nation and in its ability to promote welfare of the people. But, I feel that any correction needs to be multi-pronged and attacking the problem from all required angles. I hope that the ‘Karmayogi’ program is part of the continuous reform effort and subsequent steps are to follow with very little time lag. “Karmayogi’ in itself would not be able to deliver what the Union Government hopes to achieve.
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