After Agnipath, India is in need of a Nitipath for its civil services.
After Agnipath, India is in need of a Nitipath for its civil services
A short-service programme for entry at lower levels could help us bridge our wide governance gap
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At the heart of India’s inability to deliver basic public services is its chronic inability to address the shortfall in administrative capacity. In the past two decades, political leaders and policy analysts have chosen to side-step the complex problem of administrative reform and instead used innovative methods like privatization, public-private partnerships and technology to deliver public services. At the same time, philanthropy, corporate social responsibility funds and non-governmental organizations have stepped in to provide a variety of public services—schooling, healthcare, nutrition and skill development—that the state ought to have provided, but is unable to.
This mixed model of public service delivery has been successful, but has come at a high cost. The civil service, in general, does not face the pressure to upgrade its numbers and capabilities. It does not face systemic incentives to change. In many cases, the civil service, especially at the lower levels, is given up as a lost cause. Lacking motivation, training and performance management, the civil service depends on a few of its numbers to uphold the steel frame. Many individual civil servants work exceptionally hard, face tremendous challenges and ensure that the state maintains a base level of performance. But I don’t need to persuade you that civil service reforms are crucial.
The Narendra Modi government launched the National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building, or ‘Mission Karmayogi’ in December 2020. This effort is multi-dimensional, covering recruitment, training, performance management, rewards, and so on. But the government can take a page from its own recent innovation in military recruitment. Many aspects of the Agnipath scheme offer a model for civil service recruitments.
Prakash Singh, one of India’s most respected police officers, recently made the case for an Agnipath-like scheme for the All India Services (AIS); he called for officers to be filtered out after 10, 25 and 30 years of service. This would rectify the top-heavy structure, and create a culture of public service and performance. There is, in fact, a case for the government to launch a “Nitipath" scheme on the lines of Agnipath and the Short Service Commission for military officers.
The government can recruit four times as many candidates at the entry level without being constrained by the number of apex level positions and career paths. Instead of 600-1,000 candidates appointed to the AIS, we can have 4,000 officers entering service every year. Only 25% of them will be retained after a performance review after the fourth year. This will bring a lot of young and energetic officers at the junior levels, give them strong incentives to perform, and give them work experience in government. The average quality of the top 4,000 all-India rank holders will be not be markedly different from that of the top 1,000. So a four-year review period will allow the government to get a better pick than merely exam and interview scores.
The 3,000 or so officers leaving the Union civil service after the fourth year can be employed in the state services, where there is a crisis of selection, a massive shortfall and acute demand for better governance. Filling vacancies has a massive impact on outcomes. For instance, Aditya Dasgupta and Devesh Kapur estimate that on an average 48% of the sanctioned positions at Block Development Offices (BDOs) were vacant, and filling them would increase NREGA employment by 10%.
It is well-known that we have too few administrators, police officers, diplomats and other officials as a proportion of the population, and consistently fall short of world averages. Kapur points out that while the federal government in the US had just over 8 civilian employees per 1,000 population in 2014, India had 4.51, down from 8.47 in 1995. The capacity is especially weak at the local government level. Even if nothing else changes after the four-year mark, a Nitipath scheme will be a massive improvement over the status quo in terms of sheer numbers.
Everywhere around the world, government capacity tends to lag socio-economic development. This governance gap is acute in India and is growing wider. Bridging it requires talent in adequate numbers, with appropriate training and incentives. For India@100 to be a success story, the Indian state must do its job well. Nitipath is the way to go.
Nitin Pai is co-founder and director of The Takshashila Institution, an independent centre for research and education in public policy
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