National Civil Service System in India :A Critical ViewR. K. MishraAbstract The Indian civil service has a long history. During the Mauryan era, in ancient India, the civil servants performed the role of personal servants. During the medieval period, they were acting as state servants. In the British period they became public servants, and the civil servants became a protected service. During the 50 years of Indian independence, 1947-1997, the Indian civil service has more or less followed the British model, but the pressures emanating from within and outside are now forcing the Indian civil service to professionalise itself. The Indian civil service system is composed of the central and the provincial civil service system. The central civil service system comprises the three All-India and many other civil services. The provincial civil services follow the same pattern. The candidates for the civil services are selected on the basis of a three-tier examination. The Indian civil service system is rank-based, where generalists are preferred to specialists, and lifetime employment is provided to its incumbents. The pay and perks received by the civil servants are many more times higher than the per capita income of the common man in the country. However, these perks and perquisites have been definitely on the lower side as compared to what are being received by the private sector managers and employees of multinationals in India. The civil services are dominated by the urban middle class. A handful of universities have been able to send a large number of their English and Hindi-speaking students to the civil services. The representation of women has been very meagre, and despite the provisions of reservation of 50% seats for scheduled tribes and scheduled castes, their number has been very inadequate. Interestingly, the powerful sections of society in different provinces are well-represented in the Indian civil service system. About half of the civil service entrants have their parents employed in the central or provincial governments. The Indian civil service system has followed the classical Weberian model. In the process of cooperating with the politicians very often they tend to be conformists. The public opinion about the Indian civil service system is that they are status quoists and are no-change agents. They lack innovativeness, initiative, empathy, and drive for change. The civil servants hold exactly a different view of themselves. The Government of India and its 25 provincial governments spend about 3.5% of the GDP on its civil servants. They employ about eight million in the civil service which is 50% of the employment provided in the organised sector. The Fifth Pay Commission in its report submitted in January 1997 has suggested sweeping reforms and a 30% downsizing of the civil service across the board. The civil service reforms worldwide have in part forced the policy-makers to make the Indian civil service system people-oriented, productive, and yield the value for money. In terms of the Ferrel Heady configuration the Indian civil service system has a majority-party responsiveness and is mixed corporatist. The qualifications for entrance into, earning promotions, and retention in the civil service, are professional and performance-based. The sense of mission held by civil servants is a mixed bag of compliance, cooperation, policy-responsiveness, constitutional responsiveness, and guidance. In terms of the configuration of Philip Morgan, the Indian civil service system acts as the principal agent of the state. In saying this, it has to be kept in mind that some of the characteristics of the patrimonial state still pervade the country and to that extent also its civil service system. Introductory Remarks: The civil service system is the backbone of the administrative machinery of the Indian nation. India which is a union of states, has a democratic system. The political system of the country is pluralistic, having three tiers of administration, namely, central, provincial, and local. The federal parliament is bicameral. The lower house known as the Lok Sabha, constitutes elected members of parliament. The members of the upper house, known as the Rajya Sabha, are elected by the various provinces on the basis of an assigned strength. Together, the two houses constitute parliament and the members of these houses are called Members of Parliament. At the local level, the villages have Panchayats (council of villagers). Several villages constitute a block and the block-level councils are headed by Pradhans, known as chiefs of the blocks. These Pradhans constitute a district council which is headed by a district chief. The elections are governed by the principle of majority vote, which simply means that the elections are decided on the basis of the highest votes polled by a person. India is a multi-religious country. Its Constitution adopted in 1950 declared the country as a secular state. The Constitution recognised the special rights of minorities. Some of the religious communities follow the system of castes and sub-castes. The country's Constitution recognises English as the link, and Hindi as the national language, and bestows upon 13 more the status of official languages. The 25 provinces, and 4 union territories, of the country, besides having some of these languages as their official languages, are inhabited by masses having a number of dialects and sub-dialects. The social system of the country is characterised by inequities. As per the 1997 estimate indicated in the Draft Ninth Five-Year Plan finalised in January 1997, about 50% of the people are below the poverty line. The unemployment in the country is rampant. India is a mixed economy, where both the public and private sectors are accorded a place of importance. In the public-private sector mix, the balance is now shifting in favour of the private sector. The monopoly and controls are fading away. The government is seriously engaged in the task of infrastructure and social sector development. Both the public and private sectors are striving for gaining the competitive edge. Both the federal and provincial budgets are plagued by huge fiscal deficits. In 1996-97 the fiscal deficit was 5% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the case of the central government, and the various provincial governments also registered a similar level of deficit in relation to their state domestic product. Inflation has been a constant problem for the country. On an average, the rate of inflation has been about 10% per annum. The country's balance of trade and balance of payments have always remained in negative. One of the perennial features of the economic management of the country has been its deficit financing. Historically the country had a great past. The ancient Indian state was prosperous where art and music greatly thrived. The medieval period of the country belonged to the Moghals who introduced a number of administrative measures, including a land revenue tax collection system, local manufacturing of industrial goods, and exports of arts and crafts to the other nation states. The decline of the Moghal era saw the rise of the East India Company in the 16th century, which ruled the country for more than 150 years. The British government took over the reigns of the country from the East India Company. During its 200-year rule it created an Indian state, introduced an education system, laid down foundations of very strong administrative and bureaucratic structure, and interconnected the various parts of its administration through a vast network of road and rail transport. In 1947 the country gained its independence. In 1950 the Planning Commission was set up to initiate a system of economic planning and the First Five-Year Plan was launched in 1951. Today India is a country of over 880 million people. Though its rate of growth has touched a mark of 6.7% in 1996-97, the average rate of growth has been about 3% per annum during the 50 years of its independence, 1947-97. The rate of growth of population has, however, been about 2% per annum, leaving only 1% as the net rate of growth per annum for the country. The standards of living enjoyed by the masses are significantly lower as compared to many countries in Asia and elsewhere on the globe. Unquestionably the country faces a daunting task of lifting itself above the barriers to its growth, and assuring its people a quality of life of which they could be proud. The country also has to free itself of its past where it used to only look inwards. The main challenge before it is to integrate itself with the rest of the world and achieve the global benchmarks of the levels of efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the development of the civil service, delineate on its internal labour market, and analyse its representativeness. The issues such as the politicisation of the civil service, the perception of the civil servants about themselves, and the views that different sections of society have about them, are also discussed in the paper. The paper outlines the various measures introduced for reforming the civil service in India and the extent of their diffusion. Finally, in the concluding section, the paper sums up the salient features pertaining to the various issues discussed about the civil service, and suggests a scheme for the revamp of the Indian civil service. While the paper in general refers to the Indian civil service system, it specifically centers around the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) which acts as the hub of the administrative machinery of the country. Development of the Civil Service:
During the medieval period (1000-1600 AD), Akbar the Great founded and nurtured the civil service. During his period, he initiated land reforms (1457 AD), and established the land revenue system which later became a major constituent of the Indian taxation system. His civil service had a welfare and a regulatory-orientation. The East India Company had a civil service responsible for carrying out commercial functions. They were far away from the common people, as they never tried to mix with and impress upon them that they had been there to bring about a transformation in the Indian society. The British civil service came on the Indian scene after the takeover of the East India Company in the 1860s. Initially the British civil service was a part of a police state, where its major task was that of carrying out law and order functions. It was disjointed as the different provinces had different civil services. There was no code of conduct developed by any of the British-India provinces. The functionaries of the different provinces were free to appoint people of their choice. Officials were handpicked both from the army and non-army fields. Their pay and allowances were subject to the discretion of the government. However, these used to be very high by the standards prevailing then. The term civil service is an Indian contribution to the discipline of public administration. To distinguish the government officials from the army officials, the term civil service was used by the British government in undivided Punjab in the later part of the 18th century. The British government set up the Indian civil service in 1911, primarily with the objective of strengthening the British administration in the UK. However, it could not succeed in that, but very usefully retained the idea for strengthening the administration of its colonial base in India. Initially the recruitment to the Indian civil service was confined only to the Britishers. The minimum age of entry was kept at 19 years and the maximum age was prescribed as 21 years. The language of examination was English. The only centre for conducting the examination was London. However, due to pressures and demands raised by the Indian National Congress in 1921, Indians were allowed to take the examination. In 1922 one Indian passed the Indian Civil Service Examination. Later, on the basis of the recommendations of the Aitchison Committee, the minimum and maximum ages were increased from 19 and 21 years to 20 and 22 years respectively1. The candidates were allowed to take the examination both at London and India. A ratio of 50:50 was decided for the British and the Indian people for intake in the Indian civil service. In 1935 the British government decided to establish interim rule in the various provinces of India, which resulted in an exodus of the British subjects as civil servants and, as a result, the number of Indian subjects in the Indian civil service increased tremendously. Though initially the British government set up only the Indian civil service, later on they added a statutory civil service and central civil services. In the course of time the statutory civil service was weeded out and there remained on the scene only the remaining two services, namely, the Indian civil service and the central civil services. At the time of independence, besides the Indian civil service there were nine central civil services in the country. The independence of the country posed new challenges to the civil servants. They were no more expected to perform the role of a police state. The welfare of the Indian subjects was viewed as the central task to be performed by the Indian state, and hence they were to be an instrument of carrying out welfare functions which, among other things, included the settlement of refugees and providing minimum conditions for their day-to-day living, safeguarding the national borders from external aggression, and promoting conditions responsible for internal peace. The civil service system in post-independent India was reorganised. At the central level, the civil services included the All-India services, such as the Indian Administrative Service, the Indian Foreign Service, and the Indian Police Service, and the central services. The central services are grouped into four categories in order of their importance, namely, Group A, B, C, and D services. The union territories were to be served by both the All-India and the central services. The various provinces of the country had to have their own civil services. The onset of economic planning in India in 1951, with the launch of its First Five-Year Plan enjoined on the Indian civil service the role of development administration. In this new mould, they were expected to participate in the administration of public enterprises, regulation of the private sector, formulation of socio-economic and political policies, elimination of poverty, development of rural areas, combatting inflation, effective monetary management, reduction of gender gap, elimination of social inequity, etc. In the early 1980s the Indian state had its first experience with the severe resource crunch, which deepened by the end of the 1980s. This led to the emergence of a new economic policy in 1991, which saw a rollback of the state in economic activities both at the macro and micro levels, meaning thereby formulation of such macro-economic policies which spurred a favourable environment for private sector participation, and reforms at the macro-level leading to the contraction of the public enterprise system, and the existence of only healthy public sector units. In other words, the 1990s foresee for the state a facilitator's role. Thus, the civil service in the 1990s and beyond would have to don this new role for itself, which means the Indian Administrative Service, the Indian Foreign Service, and the Indian Police Service, as the three All-India services, and 29 other central services in the country, will have to have a new orientation. The provincial civil services will have to follow suit. To sum up the above discussion, it is clear that in ancient India, the civil servants acted as personal servants of the rulers, in the medieval age, they became state servants as they were in the state employment, and in British-India the civil servants acquired the complexion of public servants. During this period, the civil service also became a protected service, as in 1861 the first Indian Civil Service Act in India was passed which gave many privileges to the then civil servants, including their recruitment, promotion, termination, pension, payment of salaries, etc. The ethos of the civil service in independent-India changed from welfare-orientation in the late 1940s to development-orientation between the 1960s and 1980s, and finally to the facilitator's role in the 1990s, as dictated by the environmental challenges, collective choice mechanisms reflected in the manifestos issued by the various political parties during the 1996 general elections, and the challenge of meeting the democratic needs of the teeming millions. [ Editorial Note : Professor R. K. Mishra, Institute of Public
Enterprise, Osmania University Campus, Hyderabad 500007 prepared this paper
for presentation at the Conference on 'Civil Service Systems
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