*(Sarvesh Kaushal is the President of Punjab State IAS Officers’ Association)
Friends, if we do not deliver, we shall perish.
For saving us as a class from virtual redundancy and eventual extinction from the overall scheme of governance, we need to focus upon quantum and quality of citizen service delivery. The day has come when instead of looking at the peripherals in the name of administrative reform, we focus upon the fundamental structural issues affecting the citizen services adversely.
We need to remedy the virtual collapse of the state civil and allied services due to the failure to carry out regular yearly recruitments has crippled and paralysed civil administration and service delivery to the citizens. The backbone of the civil administration stands broken.
We have one state civil service officer manning upto even half a dozen posts with additional charges. We also have the key functionaries, performing executive and quasi-judicial functions, employed on temporary contracts, because we have not been able to carry out the recruitment process as a regular annual function.
The same is true of the Secretariat Administration, where administrative branches have large number of crippling vacancies, branch officers are being forced to handle multiple charges.
We also need to rationalise the deployment of our personnel. Even amongst the existing cadre officers, the distribution of assignments is so lop-sided that some of them have two or three departments to run at the same time, while a large number of eligible officers are made to idle.
We need to ensure fresh induction in the second and third tier of civil administration. At present, our aging manpower is without the essential blend of youth.
We need to focus upon Education, may it be school or higher education, or medical or technical education, where large number of key posts are vacant, there are no regular heads of many institutions, there are no timely promotions, and there are kinked wage structures with personnel engaged in the same or identical tasks have totally different wage structure and job security. The same could also be true of other social sector departments.
We need to respond to the call of our conscience rather than conveniently turning a Nelson’s eye to blatant manipulation of transfers of our junior personnel by pressure groups on extraneous considerations.
While we insist upon performance reports, we should’nt forget that performance has a direct correlation with opportunity, platform, and congenial atmosphere to work. We should rather insist upon having a potential appraisal rather than a performance appraisal when the basic pre-requisites to perform are missing most of the times.
The Standing Orders which prescribe delegation at various levels of hierarchy, are now issued at the level of every Minister for his own department, with little or no delegation of decision-making worth the name in favour of Administrative Secretaries. The Administrative Secretaries are left to defend the court cases and reply to the audit paras or face flak elsewhere. We need to insist upon a conscious and institutionalised rationalisation of the delegation process.
The Administrative Secretaries, when over-ruled, have an option to dissent and refer a case to the Chief Minister for final decision, but hardly any one takes recourse to that of late for a sure retribution and humiliation. This process needs to be institutionalized and encouraged to check the harmful tendency of pre-orchestrated decision-making.
The civil servants should not be held accountable for something which they neither decide nor implement, and where their feeble voice of propriety is not even heard, much less their opinions being heeded to.
We need to rationalise our transfer policy at all levels. The average tenure of an Administrative Secretary in a department hinges around just 12 months. This brings in ad-hocism and uncertainty which is counter-productive to the cause of efficient service delivery.
In the present era of political party’s manifesto-driven governance, it should be remembered that the civil servants neither author the manifestos nor can say a word before the manifestos are adopted by the council of ministers or otherwise by the strength of a committed political will strong enough to bulldoze any suggestion to the contrary.
It is not for the civil servants who propose sops and make gaping holes in the revenue stream of the state. There are two ways to go bankrupt. One is that you fritter away more than you earn. But a surer way is that you stop earning. The civil servants should not propose either of the two, much less the second one, and for God’s sake, not the both of them. The state should be as rich or poor as its people. We should not have a pauper state inhabited by rich people. The state finances should be guarded more vigourously and diligently than one’s own personal finances. A state must have sufficient resources for ensuring sustained developmental potential of the state.
We as civil servants should not become silent spectators and facilitators of regional as well as inter-sectoral imbalances in state developmental funding through discretionary releases. It should be remembered that discretion is an exception to the planning process. We should also not become a silent spectator to non-implementation of grass-root level planning process in its proper form and instead hijacking of the devolution mandate to a superfluous nullity.
We should also not become a silent spectator of ominous rigging of municipal and panchayat elections by keeping quiet even when we are posted as independent observers by our state government / state election commission. I have spoken to some of the observers and one of them quipped : “The so called ‘independent’ observers from within the state government can do very little because they are, as the famous poet Pash wrote in a different context, ‘ilh de panje wich ud de azaad chuhe’- (as independent as a mouse in the claws of a flying kite).
We need to build in-house departmental vigilance teams for fair and objective vigilance under the Administrative Secretary for taking fair, impartial and just vigilance measures to ensure corruption free service delivery.
Instead of being rubber stamps just for issuing formal orders of appointments, we need to keep in mind while dealing with such files, that the credibility, impartiality and profound respect of the Constitutional bodies like the PPSC, or various statutory Commissions, or other institutions has a direct co-relation with the integrity, impartiality and suitability of the persons who are nominated to man them.
Putting an end to this seemingly endless thought process, I wish to conclude on a lighter note. I was having a cup of tea with an esteemed senior and asked for his message for my young colleagues. Pat came the poetic message :-
“Apni to jaise taise,
Thori aage ya peeche,
Kat jayegee,
Aap ka kya hoga,
Janaab-i- aali ?
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Sarvesh Kaushal 