MAKING MERIT COUNT

The Modi government's decision to implement the 360-degree performance appraisal has shaken up India's grand old bureaucracy. The remodelling of governance is forcing civil servants to figure out how to stay relevant in a world where technology is taking over jobs

- NAMRATA BIJI AHUJA

While serving as chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi was annoyed when some of his aides complained about a senior bureaucrat’s incompetence and character flaws. Asking them why the concerns were not flagged earlier, he said promotion committee meetings had no meaning if all officers were automatically promoted. Such thoughts perhaps triggered the ongoing remodelling of India’s bureaucratic steel frame.

The most striking feature of the remodelling is the new 360-degree appraisal, which determines the selection of joint secretaries and higher officers at the Centre. This first big change has shaken up a privileged section in the bureaucracy in Lutyens Delhi.

But how did the cosy club come into being? According to Rajiv Mehrishi, a 1978-batch IAS officer who served as finance secretary, home secretary and comptroller and auditor general of India, it was the product of the country’s socialist system. He said: “Accepted first as a policy and then as a constitutional obligation, avowedly for the benefit of the poor, it, in fact, created an elite whose vested interest was to keep talking about the poor and keep benefiting from a system that gave them a privileged existence and a superior social status.”

It created a situation where the levers of power were wielded by an elite club of English speakers, as divorced from real India as any Indian could be. “We have had generations of bureaucrats, judges, doctors and lawyers, almost as if obtaining positions by inheritance had not been discontinued,” said Mehrishi.