What Ails The Babu?

India's bureaucratic addiction is an old pathology but despite decades of debate our babus remain mired in a culture of lethargy, corruption, political influence and a bloated yet inadequate workforce. The country needs its civil servants but it's time for a new template.

- Ajit Kumar Jha

Aiming to inject vigour and vitality into the Leviathan that is India’s 164-year-old bureaucracy, the Narendra Modi-led NDA government decided in June 2018 to open the highest echelons of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), with over 5,000 officers, to outstanding domain experts from the private sector and academia. Bypassing the constitutionally sanctioned Union Public Service Commission examination, the central government invited applications from candidates under the age of 40 and with 15 years of experience for the post of joint secretary—the cerebrum of the top bureaucracy dealing with policymaking—in the 10 key departments of Revenue; Financial Services; Economic Affairs; Agriculture, Cooperation & Farmers’ Welfare; Road Transport & Highways; Shipping; Environment, Forests and Climate Change; New & Renewable Energy; Civil Aviation and Commerce.

It would add just 10 more specialists to the existing 341 joint secretaries, 249 of them IAS officers, for a fixed tenure of three years, extendable by two. It symbolised how daunting it is to reform the cumbersome bureaucracy. In the past, several economists—among them, former prime minister Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Raghuram Rajan, Rakesh Mohan, Arvind Panagariya, Rajiv Kumar, Arvind Subramaniam—have been brought in from the outside. An ardent admirer of lateral entry, Panagariya says: “For the first time in its 70-year history, the system itself is being opened to bring outside experts into bureaucracy on a competitive basis.”