In 1970, Georg Akerlof wrote his famous paper on the lemon market, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Economics. It had a strong intuition about the used car market under asymmetric information; Here, sellers know the defects of their vehicles, whereas buyers do not. Sellers of the worst cars are eager to sell, while buyers fear they will get ‘lemons’ (bad cars). Doubt drives down the prices of all cars, and so good cars stay out of the market. This is a case of low-quality cars running out of good quality, which is an unfavorable market outcome.
For a long time, India’s civil services were seen as our steel-frame. At the recruiting point, the system picked up the best. It is a different matter that after that the merit-selected candidates had to face the downfall. Nevertheless, recruiting officers for the civil services was not a problem and their training was designed to prepare the horses for the courses. Recent developments, unfortunately, are turning it into a lemon market.
Recently, I was invited to interview candidates for top civil services in a state. Some things startled me which have no end. Firstly, the candidates are much older than before. With the increasing age gap, apparently in the name of helping rural candidates and disadvantaged groups, we have entered a trap where any training and redirection would be a challenge. Second, candidates spend a lot of time preparing for entrance exams, in some cases up to 10-12 years. It can deplete one’s energy in a highly productive period of one’s life. Such aspirants are often deprived of real world work experience. If they hide information about the work they’re doing, it’s the same as old cars. If they were busy single-handedly in preparing for the exam, they would have lost many valuable experiences. Three chances should be enough to clear the exam, but we have candidates who have scored more than half a dozen chances. This is unfair to new test takers and does not give us any clear advantage.
Everyone is both existentially and psychologically responsible for their work life. A person joining the late service has only 18-20 years of service. A short career span can change a candidate’s priorities to our collective detriment. It’s no surprise that we hear about the embarrassingly high-handedness and sordid behavior displayed by many recruits.
The recruitment system is being blown up. The political economy was anyway uncomfortable with a free, conscientious and rules-bound bureaucracy. Vested interests wanted horses for courses in a system suited to them. Checks and balances were considered odd and corruption was the least of his concerns. Real-world players knew it was more effective to replace the game with their own rules. They wanted the standards to be lowered, to be done by constantly revising the exam syllabus to reduce the number of optional papers and remove the difficult items clearly meant for rural and poor students. The intellectual acuity needed to achieve proficiency in a variety of subjects was lost. It serves as a way to game the system. The Preliminary Examination, a screening test to select a pool of candidates, has become so unpredictable that a large proportion of high-quality candidates do not pass muster. A common complaint is that many questions are not very relevant. The next stage is more subjective; It asks for essay on fundamental questions. As a result, a poorly written essay can outweigh a good essay with little help. In the final stage, the expert invitees could know the ideological biases. This makes pre-selection a possibility in a system where points given liberally can tilt the scale.
Once I was invited to become a consultant in a coaching center. I went and met its students. Thirty years ago, these candidates would not have dared to spend their time and effort for this exam. Inadequate preparation for an intensely competitive exam would have been in vain. But it seems that they now know the system very well and appear confident of their opportunities, even if they have not invested enough in their studies.
I am not talking about the disadvantages of studying in a local medium. Going to a poor quality English medium school is worse than going to a good quality local language school. It is not even about reservation, which many people allege. Some of the most efficient and compassionate officers I have seen belonged to the reserved categories. But the extension of reservation beyond a certain level could have created a problem.
What are the country’s best prepared students doing? Most seem to have opted out of the system. Thus, as in the market for Akerlof’s lemons, not-so-good quality has outsold the superior quality, as the recruiting market does not value the latter. His exit because of the availability of other career options is as much an attempt to escape the unpredictability of a game system.
Real-world special interests can celebrate its success in bringing Gresham’s law to one of our most difficult areas, which once always attracted the best. It is possible that many candidates are pre-selected for ideological conformity, designed to be sufficiently low to control and morally weak enough to be sent on paper without being guided by conscience. No wonder we see so many gaps in our administrative capacity.
The desired result by the mighty forces is ready to materialise. In the end, politicians might succeed in getting their yes-men on while no one was watching. I hope the rumors of convalescence in recruitment are not true, but the concern about a downward spiral is real.
These are personal views of the author.
Satya Mohanty is a former Secretary to the Government of India