Schooling babus

It’s a bold idea, certainly. Whether it is a feasible one and, more important, a useful one, would need more scrutiny, assessment and debate. Manmohan Singh, as an intellectual and minister, has always voiced his concern about the competence of the bureaucracy because he saw it as the ultimate delivery system — the link between government and citizen; between policy and reality. Manmohan Singh, as prime minister, has now mooted the idea of enhancing the quality of administration by drawing in the best of the country’s young talent into this sector through the means of an entrance examination to the All-India and Central services in the manner of the entrance process to the Ecole Nationale d’administration in France.

There can be no doubt that reforming the civil service is an idea whose time has come. There is not just a decided cynicism, apathy and proclivity towards corruption within our bureaucratic ranks, there is a gross lack of talent and expertise. At a time when administrators are required to be more conversant with international trends — social, economic and intellectual — the rust inherent in the country’s famed steel frame has never been more manifest. But whether the path of reform lies through the high school is a question that the country must ask itself. Indeed, it can be argued that herding teenagers into the civil services stream, before they have discovered themselves and the world in which they live, may be premature in the extreme and unlikely to make them better administrators. Such a step could, besides, undermine even further the commitment to the liberal arts that every democracy worth its name should nurture. It would be wrong to lay the blame for the present state of administration in India at the door of the graduate or post-graduate. The root of the problem goes far deeper. There is, for instance, no system at present by which incompetent officers are weeded out, no process of selecting the best among them for the specific tasks at hand.

Indeed, one reform that had been suggested is for jobs at the levels of additional secretary and above in government to be delinked from the permanent civil service and go to those within and outside the system who are best capable of executing them. There is also the perennial problem of the politicisation of the bureaucracy and the extraneous pressures brought to bear on competent officers committed to their work. Administrative reform would, then, require more than entrance examination reform because even the “best and brightest”, drawn from a larger “talent pool”, can get destroyed by a flawed and corrupt system.

The early reservations expressed here are, of course, tentative and only by way of initiating the wider debate that the prime minister hopes to foster. The Express, on its part, promises to do its best to foster it in the days ahead.