Trial By Hire

The government says lateral entry to secretarial posts will bring in more expertise. Critics, however, say it could undermine reservation and encourage entry of right-wingers.

- Pratul Sharma

It was on a flight in the early 1970s that the then minister of foreign trade Lalit Narayan Mishra met a young Indian economist, Manmohan Singh, who was working with the United Nations. Impressed by the interaction, Mishra hired him as an adviser in his ministry in 1972. That was one of the better-known examples of lateral entry into the government. Singh went on to become the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, the Reserve Bank governor and, by a stroke of luck, the prime minister in 2004.

Governments have for long been looking for specialists in different fields to overcome the talent deficit in their ranks. The current Narendra Modi government is no different. Last June, Modi appointed Rajesh Kotecha, an ayurveda doctor and former vice chancellor of Gujarat Ayurved University, as a secretary in the AYUSH ministry. Current Prasar Bharati CEO Shashi Shekhar Vempati, who earlier worked with Infosys, is another example of lateral entry to a post usually held by a bureaucrat.

A few months before Kotecha’s appointment, the prime minister’s office had asked the NITI Aayog to create a policy for hiring specialists as lateral entry to middle-rung posts. Economist Arvind Panagariya, who was vice chairman of NITI Aayog, came out with a policy document, India—Three-year Action Agenda 2017-20, which first articulated the lateral entry policy at the joint-secretary level. In April 2017, the document was cleared after a NITI Aayog meeting.

But, more than a year later, when the government came out with an advertisement seeking applicants for 10 joint-secretary posts, curiously on a Sunday, it opened a Pandora’s box.