HIRE THE EXPERTS
INDIA’S BUREAUCRACY FACES A SEVERE SHORTAGE OF EXPERTS. CAN LATERAL ENTRY SOLVE THE PROBLEM?
India’s bureaucracy faces a severe shortage of experts. Can lateral entry solve the problem?
One of the first tasks the Narendra Modi government set itself after assuming office for a second term was to grapple with the inadequacies of the current bureaucracy. Possibly the most glaring of those is a massive shortage of administrators in government. The scale of the problem was flagged in the Lok Sabha on July 4 by Union minister for labour and employment Santosh Gangwar when he informed the House that almost 700,000 government posts were vacant as of March 2018, 260,000 of them in the Indian Railways alone.
One way of filling the vacancies is ‘lateral entry’, bypassing the standard route of inducting civil servants via the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and recruiting directly from the private sector. On this count, in June this year, Dr C. Chandramouli, secretary of the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), asked officials to prepare a proposal for the induction of private sector experts to the deputy secretary and director level positions in the IAS. According to sources, a total of 40 such specialist officers are likely to be appointed laterally. Even the NITI Aayog, the central government think-tank, might do the same for deputy secretary and joint secretary level positions.
‘Today, the complexity of the economy means that policymaking is a highly specialised activity. Therefore, it is essential that specialists be inducted into the system. Lateral entry will also have the beneficial side effect of bringing competition to the established career bureaucracy,’ notes a draft report by the NITI Aayog on civil services reform.
NEW DOG, OLD TRICKS
That being said, lateral entry into the administrative services is not a new idea. It is a widely applied practice, with the governments of the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand as well as several members of the European Union doing the same. Even in India, the idea was proposed as early as 2001, when the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) report of the civil services examination review committee, chaired by noted economist Yoginder Alagh, recommended lateral entry into the middle and top tiers of the bureaucracy. Then, in 2005, the second Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC), chaired by Veerappa Moily, recommended that an institutionalised, transparent process be established for lateral entry into central and state government administrative positions. The year after that, the Justice B.N. Srikrishna-headed sixth central pay commission report reiterated the recommen
dation, stating that lateral entry could also ‘ensure entry and retention of talent in the civil services’.
There is also notable precedent for highly qualified professionals being laterally inducted into the top echelons of administration. The list includes heavyweights such as former prime minister Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Raghuram Rajan, Urjit Patel, Arvind Panagariya, Arvind Subramanian and Nandan Nilekani, among several others.
However, resistance from the strong IAS lobby and sheer institutional inertia has so far led to these recommendations remaining words on paper, or being mired in administrative delays. The NDA government had taken up this issue in June last year, recommending the induction of private sector professionals to senior joint secretary level positions in the IAS. In April this year, the UPSC selected nine professionals for these vacant posts. Despite the fact that the list includes IIT and IIM alumni, Rhodes scholars and graduates of institutes as renowned as Oxford, none of them has been inducted as yet.
While these proposals have been mooted in the past, the Modi government’s official policy decision to employ lateral entry on a large scale is an ambitious, out-of-thebox attempt to solve the problem. Experts say this move was triggered by the NITI Aayog’s 2017 report, which underlined the urgent need to induct specialists into the administrative systems. It was also presented as a solution to the dire shortage of senior bureaucrats, especially in the IAS, which has only 5,004 such officers, against an authorised strength of 6,500. This shortage also affects other government sectors, including in the police and judiciary. It is especially acute in the Hindi heartland states, including Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Rajasthan. In India’s most populous state, UP, the overall shortage is 43 per cent, according to a 2016 study.
THE DEBATE OVER LATERAL ENTRY
Those who advocate ‘minimum government’ often describe the bureaucracy as ‘bloated’, arguing that vacancies do not need to be filled because the administrative services are already overstaffed. However, public administration experts disagree, arguing that the Indian civil services are facing an acute shortage of skilled workers and domain experts. This disagreement is a big reason for the slow progress in adopting lateral entry as a method of filling government posts. Another point of contention is the role of the bureaucracy in India’s successes.
Sabeer Bhatia, the founder of Hotmail—who is in favour of lateral entry—argues that India has had some spectacular, nation-transforming successes that owe nothing to the bureaucracy. Bhatia cites the example of the Green Revolution, India’s space and atomic energy programmes, the rollout of Aadhaar and the Unified Payments Interface,
telecom deregulation and the liberalisation of the financial sector, among others. “Take the four most innovative and, therefore, lucrative industries today,” he continues. “These include semiconductors, avionics, medical equipment and pharmaceuticals. What value has the Indian bureaucracy added to these sectors? Zero. The global semiconductor industry, for example, has a healthy percentage of Indians in leadership positions—and yet, India’s national contribution remains nil.” The Indian government cannot contribute to such specialised (and remunerative) sectors, he argues, without experts from the global market being brought into leadership positions in the bureaucracy—which depends on the adoption of lateral entry.
Shailaja Chandra, a former secretary in the government, takes the argument further, saying in specialised areas “like finance, accounts, taxation, legal affairs, disinvestment, and budgeting, procurement and revenue collection” lateral entry is likely to be effective. “In such areas, mid-level lateral entrants can bring skills that IAS officers or Group A officers do not possess.” However, she also notes that “the IAS, as a service, remains indispensable to the process of government. No lateral inductees can ever replace it,” cautioning that the process must not “deteriorate into a revolving door between the government and the private sector, audit and chartered accountancy firms and thinktanks set up by industry.”
However, many civil servants disagree hotly with the wisdom of lateral inductions, arguing that the in-field experience and knowledge of government processes, administrative hurdles and workarounds that IAS officers bring to the table are a form of expertise that private sector professionals cannot possibly have. “External talent cannot bridge the gap between policymaking and ground-level implementation the way career civil servants can,” says a chief secretary, requesting anonymity. Critics from within the bureaucracy also allege that lateral entry is unconstitutional, contrary to the public good and is likely to bypass the system of quotas meant to ensure that scheduled castes and scheduled tribes have appropriate levels of representation. “This move to induct private talent into the government, [bypassing] reservations, is illegal and can be challenged both in court and in Parliament,” says former BJP MP and Indian Revenue Service officer Udit Raj (who switched to the Congress ahead of the Lok Sabha election). And there are other protests against the NDA government’s new policy direction. Congress leader Veerappa Moily, for instance, who had himself recommended lateral entry to the bureaucracy as chairman of the second ARC report, says, “The BJP government’s move on lateral recruitment is part of its roadmap to saffronise the civil services.”
TO PERMIT OR NOT TO PERMIT
It’s hard to argue with the fact that the Indian administrative ecosystem is heavily staffed by generalists, and that specialists are becoming increasingly important in several functions of government. For instance, specialisations like big-data analytics are crucial to good governance—for example, it does not matter how wide the net of Aadhaar is spread if the babus responsible for those database cannot come to grips with it. Domain expertise is no longer a bonus—it is a requirement.
The colonial-style bureaucracy India still labours under, the so-called ‘steel fortress’, is a major impediment to progress. In a 2016 study conducted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, titled ‘The IAS Meets Big Data’, the authors write: ‘India’s economy has grown rapidly in recent years, but the country’s bureaucratic quality is widely perceived to be either stagnant or in decline’, and that ‘the IAS is hamstrung by political interference and outdated personnel procedures, [has] a mixed record on policy implementation, and is in need of urgent reform.”
Agriculture secretary and CEO of National Rainfed Authority, Ashok Dalwai, says: “IAS officers must compete and collaborate with external specialists, instead of complaining about them or criticising them. Reform must disrupt and change the hierarchical culture of the IAS.”
India’s bureaucracy has long been criticised for being obstructionist, and that it has often been an impediment to implementing even well-intended policy initiatives. Besides, bureaucratic procedures are cumbersome, slow, inefficient and trapped in a file-pushing culture that encourages corrution. Critics point out that a bureaucracy manned by generalists is like a slow-moving bullock cart in an era when information travels at the speed of light. Ths status quoists in the bureaucracy see red. It is disquieting, after all, for an entrenched force to see its ‘steel fortress’—even a crumbling one—being stormed by plebeians.
TAKE THE FOUR MOST INNOVATIVE AND LUCRATIVE INDUSTRIES TODAY— SEMICONDUCTORS, AVIONICS, MEDICAL EQUIPMENT AND PHARMACEUTICALS. WHAT VALUE HAS THE INDIAN BUREAUCRACY ADDED TO THESE SECTORS? ZERO Sabeer Bhatia Hotmail founder