The Modi government’s decision to halt its lateral recruitment scheme for civil services’ posts, following criticism over the lack of reservation, has elicited a variety of reactions.
While serving officers have by and large been restrained in their comments, retired officials and commentators have been quite vociferous in critiquing the government’s backtracking—from former cabinet secretary KM Chandrasekhar to Finance Commission chairman Arvind Panagariya to Future of India Foundation director Ruchi Gupta, to columnist and former BJP leader Sudheendra Kulkarni, among many others. So much so, that it now appears as if the lateral entrants were the panacea to anything and everything that was wrong with the government.
But some voices have gone against the grain. Before the current controversy broke out, former UPSC chairman Deepak Gupta noted that “lateral entry of professionals is a very simplistic solution seeking to remedy a very complex problem”. Used sparingly it is fine, he said, but a ‘liberal approach’ could destroy the system. Writing in ThePrint, Dilip Mandal gave a nuanced view by pointing out that it was wrong to postulate it in terms of a binary: efficiency and merit versus social inclusion. He also highlighted that lateral recruitment of experts is not a new phenomenon, except that such appointments earlier took place at the top level.
In the current instance, the UPSC cancelled advertised lateral recruitments for 45 posts at the levels of joint secretary, director, and deputy secretary levels. Induction at these levels cannot affect ‘policy’. These positions are not senior enough to bring about radical transformation— like the Aadhaar card by Nandan Nilekani, the economic reforms led by Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Manmohan Singh, or Bimal Jalan’s financial sector restructuring. Similarly, MS Swaminathan and Verghese Kurien, who spearheaded the Green and White Revolutions respectively, were inducted as secretaries to the Government of India.
The proposed recruits would have been far too junior to leave any noticeable imprint, if at all.
Moreover, the Cabinet itself already includes professionals in key positions—from External Affair Minister S Jaishankar and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to Petroleum Minister Hardeep Puri and Information & Broadcasting Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw. The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), National Security Agency (NSA), and NITI Aayog are also dominated by serving and retired bureaucrats.
The fact of the matter is that Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to have more faith in civil servants than in his political colleagues. In the big four ministries—Finance, Home, Defence, and External Affairs—two at the helm are not political leaders in the conventional sense of the term. In the recent visuals of the PM’s visit to Ukraine, he was flanked by External Affairs Minister Jaishankar and NSA Ajit Doval —a clear indicator of how the strategic direction of the country is shaped.
Ultimately, the argument that the government wanted to induct lateral entrants to inject ‘new ideas’ at an intermediate level does not cut much ice. Perhaps the government was trying to push multiple agendas through lateral entry, but these efforts have backfired. The question is— why?
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No silver bullet
Most firing ranges—whether at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA) or those used by NCC cadets—have the phrase ‘Ek Goli, Ek Dushman, Ek Nishana’ emblazoned in red or orange as the masthead. The message is clear. Do not lose focus, stay on track, and use your bullet wisely.
In treating lateral entry as a silver bullet, the government erred by attempting to address two very different issues simultaneously. The first was the shortage of officers at certain levels in the government because of reduced intake between the 1996-2002 batches of the IAS, as well as the reluctance of state governments to send officers to serve in the Union government. The second issue was the perceived need to hire domain specialists in sectors such as agriculture extension, cybersecurity, and international collaborations in civil aviation.
When these two objectives got intertwined, and the number of lateral entrants to be inducted became too large, questions arose—especially regarding social inclusion. The induction of 45 officers at the levels of joint secretaries and directors in one cohort is more than a quarter of the total recruitment of around 180 IAS officers each year. It was the sheer numbers, the level of induction, and non-adherence to existing reservation rules in recruitment that led to such an uproar.
Let us, however, get to the root of the problem.
Why did this shortage appear in 2016-17, when the Modi government mooted the proposal for the lateral entry scheme? To understand this, we need to go back to the mid-1990s.
I was a deputy director at the LBSNAA (1995-2002) when the batch size for new officers was drastically reduced from 150-170 per year to just 55 for the IAS, 36 for the IPS, and 24 for the IFS. The reason for this was the Charan Singh government’s 1979 decision to increase the induction quota from state services from the existing 20 per cent to 33.33 per cent. However, for over a decade, no follow-up action was taken by the cadre-controlling authorities—Department of Personnel & Training (DoPT) for the IAS, Ministry of Home Affairs for the IPS, and Ministry of External Affairs for the IFS—to fast-track promotions from the ‘feeder cadres’.
This led various state service associations—including the Karnataka State Forest Service Association and the state civil service associations of Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Punjab, among others—to approach the courts to enforce the 1979 decision. They also pointed out that in calculating the number of vacancies, the cadre-controlling authorities were only looking at the cadre posts held by the three All India Services (AIS) and not the overall strength of the cadre.
To illustrate, while posts above a certain rank—like district magistrate in the case of the IAS—can only be held by an IAS officer, positions like sub-divisional magistrates in the junior scale or chairpersons/managing directors of state PSUs, ranging from the senior to the apex scale, may be held by either IAS officers or by members of feeder services or internal candidates from the organisation concerned.
In 1995, the three ministries agreed to reduce direct recruitments until the balance between direct recruits and those from state services was restored. But two decades later, the problem returned to haunt the government. For while the number of direct recruits had been cut down to about one-third, those inducted from the state civil services had superannuated, leaving the government with a shortage.
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‘Deputation’ misnomer & a way forward
Linked to the issue is the reluctance of state governments to send officers on deputation to the Centre. The term ‘deputation’ is actually a misnomer because AIS officers have a duty, right, and responsibility to serve both the state government of their cadre and the Centre.
Given that recruitment levels in all three AIS (IAS, IPS, IFS) were restored from 2003, the problem of shortages—at least on the count of recruitment—ought to have been resolved by now.
There were two possible ways in which this temporary crisis could have been addressed.
The first was to fast-track the promotion of joint secretaries and bring in additional numbers from other All India and central services, besides encouraging officers in state governments to apply for positions in the Government of India. Instead, according to whispers in the North Block, advice given by the World Bank governance group and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation led to ‘lateral induction’ being seen as a silver bullet.
But this didn’t account for the fact that, as I’ve earlier said, “a ministry is an ecosystem where teamwork, consensus-building, and taking everyone along are equally, if not more important, than individual brilliance and domain expertise”.
This is not to say that domain expertise is not required, but the appropriate place for lateral entry based on domain competencies is in NITI Aayog. The four specialist members there can certainly benefit from distinguished fellows, advisers, and domain experts who can give them the best inputs in their respective fields. These, in turn, can be shared with the relevant ministries. In any case, inputs from NITI Aayog are always taken on board in the preparation of cabinet notes.
We now come to the crucial issue of domain specialisation and expertise within the government. Mission Karmayogi, launched with much fanfare by the PM in 2020, was supposed to address this issue through the Capacity Building Commission. Mid-career training at LBSNAA was to be aligned with the roles officers were expected to perform. Identifying and preparing officers for their roles was intended to be a collaborative exercise between the officers themselves and the DoPT—based on the officers’ interests and the government’s requirements for the coming decade.
The first step in this exercise was for secretaries to draft the vision and mission statements of their respective departments, based on feedback and inputs from key stakeholders—parliamentarians, legislators, domain experts, industry, as well as trade, labour, and farmer organisations, as the case may be.
However, this step has not yet been accomplished in several ministries. Perhaps the Capacity Building Commission should step in to ensure that internal competencies are developed to address the issues and challenges faced by the ministries in implementing the vision of Viksit Bharat, with specialist inputs and scenario-building by NITI Aayog.
Sanjeev Chopra is a former IAS officer and Festival Director of Valley of Words. Until recently, he was Director, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration. He tweets @ChopraSanjeev. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)