Has the IAS failed the Nation? An article by Sh. Duwuri Subbarao IAS and a former RBI governor. -Courtesy Times Of India

 

Has the IAS failed the Nation?

{The biggest problem with the IAS is a deeply flawed system of incentives and penalties. The service still attracts some of the best talent in the country, and young recruits come in with sharp minds and full of enthusiasm to ‘change the world’. But soon, they become cogs in the wheels of complacency and acquiescence, turn lazy and cynical, and worse, lose their moral compass}

 Yes, and it's not all politicians' fault. The service rewards mediocrity & risk aversion

 I wish the answer were a resounding 'no'. Much to my regret though, that’s not the case. The public perception of  the IAS today is of an elitist self-serving, status quo perpetuating set of bureaucrats who are out of touch with reality who wallow in their privileges and social status and have lost the courage of conviction to standup for what’s right.

It wasn’t always like this, in the mid-1970s when I was a fresh entrant into the service, if the government was being attacked by the opposition on a scam or a scandal, all that the CM had to do was to stand up in the Assembly and announce that he would appoint an IAS officer to inquire into the matter. That was enough to shut out the debate. Today if a CM said that, she is likely to be booed. It’s difficult to put a precise date on when the decline started. 

When the IAS was instituted soon after Independence as a successor to the colonial era ICS, it was seen as the home grown answer to the enormous task of nation building in a country embarking on an unprecedented experiment  of anchoring  democracy in a poor, illiterate society. Whether it was agricultural development. Land reforms, building irrigation projects, promoting industry, improving health and education delivery, implementing social justice or enforcing the rule of law. The IAS was seen as the delivery arm. IAS officers led this effort from the front, built an impressive development administration network from ground zero and earned for the service a formidable reputation for competence, commitment and integrity that reputation began unraveling. In subsequent  decades. The IAS lost its ethos and its way Ineptitude, indifference and corruption had crept in. Arguably, this negative stereotype view is shaped by a minority of officers who have gone astray but the worry is that that minority is no longer small.

A CM once told me that of the IAS officers at his disposal, about 25% were callous, corrupt or incompetent, the middle 50% had happily turned into sinecures and that he had to depend on the remaining 25% to get all his work done. The Prime Minister echoed a similar view when he openly expressed in the Parliament last year his disenchantment with the ‘babu culture’ in the bureaucracy.

What explains this malaise in the IAS? The standard scapegoats are the recruitment examination, the induction training and subsequent in-service training, limited opportunities for self improvement and indifferent or even callous career management.

 For sure, these are all areas in need of improvement but to believe that these are the biggest problems ailing the IAS is to miss the wood for the trees. The biggest problem with the IAS is a deeply flawed system of incentives and penalties. The service still attracts some of the best talent in the country, and young recruits come in with sharp minds and full of enthusiasm to ‘change the world’. 

But soon, they become cogs in the wheels of complacency and acquiescence, turn lazy and cynical, and worse, lose their moral compass. IAS officers would like the world to believe that this happens because of politicians standing in the way of their delivering results. You can’t miss noticing that most IAS memoirs arc, at heart, tales of: *T was going to do great things but politicians came in the way and stopped me,” 

I don’t want to trivialize the challenge of political interference; in a democracy it comes with the territory But to blame Has the IAS failed the politicians for the intellectual and moral decline of the IAS is self-serving. Politicians will of course dangle carrots but why should officers go for them? What happens though is that some individual officers with weak moral fabric succumb to the temptation and others follow suit, either attracted by the rewards or simply to save their careers.

The truth is that no political system, no matter how venal, can corrupt a bureaucracy if it stands united and inflexibly committed to collective high standards of ethics and professional integrity.

 Sadly, that’s not been the IAS story. It strikes me that Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the UK is currently being investigated for alleged ’party-gate’ transgressions by the British equivalents of our cabinet secretary and the Delhi police. And not one member of the UK parliament, not even an opposition MP, has cast any doubt on the integrity of the probes. Such a thing happening in our system is unimaginable, and that’s a reflection not of the low esteem in which our politicians are held but of the low esteem in which our bureaucracy is held.

So, what is the problem with incentives and penalties? For a start, when everyone gets promoted by efflux of time, to use a bureaucratic phrase, there is no pressure on officers to perform and deliver results. In a system where the smart, enthusiastic and capable are not assured of rising to the top, and the corrupt, lazy and incompetent don’t get weeded out, there is no motivation for officers to upgrade their knowledge and skills. A system that promotes mediocrity and risk aversion rather than innovation and change sinks to a low common denominator as indeed the IAS has.

The IAS has to be reformed into a meritocracy. There will be resistance of course but it is doable. How to go about that has to await another opinion piece. I am deeply conscious that there are hundreds of young IAS officers out there in the field performing near miracles under testing circumstances. Sadly my generation of civil servants and subsequent cohorts have bequeathed a flawed legacy to these unsung heroes. To them passes the challenge and opportunity of recovering the soul of the IAS.

The writer, a former RBI governor, was aIso an 1 A S officer.