The concerns over the recent move by the central government to gain the upper hand in the allocation of elite civil servants are serious, genuine and largely miss the point. New Delhi has a case for trying to address its human resource crunch that has persisted for more than two decades. States have the right to oppose a unilateral attempt to change the balance of work. And the central government’s decision to grab its share of Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers from the states has constitutional, administrative and political implications and claims its impact on the entire civil service. Obviously, the matter is serious and real. But why is this beside the point?
The big, old, open and ugly secret is that states have generally failed their public services: with almost no exception, states have been able to recruit adequate numbers of civil servants, train them properly, and maintain their standards and standards. Have failed to raise prospects, manage them fairly and make demands. performance of them. Considering that most of the public services that a citizen expects and faces on a day to day basis are provided by the state governments, the sheer fact that the state administrative machinery is broken and dysfunctional makes it so shocking. It’s gonna be that we’ve learned to ignore it.
In the unfortunate event that your home or workplace catches on fire, you will be lucky to avoid serious damage. The manpower shortage in fire departments across the country is 90% of the sanctioned strength. Note that often, the accepted numbers themselves fall short of international norms. If those injured are taken to a government hospital, you will be lucky to get timely treatment. Because there is a shortage of nurses and doctors. More than 20 states have a doctor-to-population ratio below the World Health Organization norm of 1:1,000. But in the government system in India, this ratio is pathetic, of 0.08:1,000. Also, if you suspect a conspiracy behind the accident, you will be lucky if the perpetrators are caught. On an average, state police forces are 24% less than their sanctioned strength, which is certainly below the required level. If your case goes to court, there is a shortage of prosecutors and judges. Around 23% of posts in lower courts are vacant, and many states have been able to fill only 50% of vacancies in the past 10 years.
I could tell about teachers, tehsildars, engineers etc. Deficiency is almost universal. We are talking about thousands of vacancies which are lying unfilled for years together in almost every Indian state. These officers are responsible for everything from picking up the garbage to putting the criminals in jail.
Yet no one cares that these posts are incomplete. So, if we are really concerned about public services, the controversy over the posting of a few dozen IAS officers is beyond point.
So why can’t states hire enough people? Karnataka is one of the better governed states of the country. Yet, the Karnataka Public Service Commission (KPSC) has conducted only three rounds of recruitment in the Karnataka Administrative Service (KAS) in a decade. The High Court had stayed one round due to alleged irregularities. In another, the exam was notified in 2015, was conducted in 2017, but the recruitment remained incomplete in 2019 as well. One person told me – without a hint of irony – that the KPSC is getting delayed due to short staffing.
Political economy is deeply rooted in the failure of states to nurture an efficient and professional civil services.
Government jobs have become robes of power, to be distributed on caste and regional basis which help politicians to win elections. When this political ‘reality’ meets government recruitment rules, things first get stuck and then come undone. This is India’s great crisis of choice. The solution is political. But the state leaders do not want to spend their political capital on this. Instead, they depend on a few hundred All India Service officers assigned to their states.
It’s not that there aren’t solutions. is that there is no public demand to find them. One way, for example, would be for states to accept the Combined Public Service Commission (UPSC) exam rank as a basic criterion for recruitment to state services, with state-specific tests and conditions as an add-on. If admission to a nationwide medical college can be done on the basis of a single entrance test, why not a state level civil service? In fact, adopting the same test for the public services of the Union and the State would not only raise the standards of the latter, but would also reduce the disparities of status between the two. Why should a sub-inspector not aspire to become the Director General of Police of his state? Why shouldn’t a KAS officer become the Chief Secretary of Karnataka, or indeed, the Cabinet Secretary to the Government of India?
Of course, the unilateral action of the Union on the distribution of All India Service officers shakes the federal balance. Yet, federalism is suffering more serious damage as states, municipalities and panchayats across the country are failing our citizens partly because of administrative inefficiency.
It is entirely within the powers, interests and resources of the states to do their work together. If they do, they will not have to worry much about how many IAS officers the central government wants to take from their share.
Nitin Pai is the co-founder and director of the Taxila Institution, an independent center for research and education in public policy.
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