Forget Generalists, Hire Specialists

India’s bureaucracy faces a severe shortage of experts. Can lateral entry solve the problem?

- Ajit Kumar Jha

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.

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