This isn’t the rant of an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) hater. Truth be told, I have friends in the premier service, and like many in this country, if I were smart enough in that format of the game, I might’ve been one myself!

But as I look back at the state of the IAS, just as well it is disbanded – at least made significantly different than the shape it has taken in the last 66 years.
Here are at least six reasons why the premier instrument of service to the citizen is merely dragging on: a pale reflection of its original mandate, a mute, if not utterly evil, toy in the hand of the political master, and with hardly any energy or spunk left to serve us, the taxpaying public.

1 Where the leader is battered

The head of the civil service is the cabinet secretary. He (there still hasn’t been a ‘she’ in this job) isn’t just a note-taker at cabinet meetings or even a clearing house. He’s mandated to stand up and be counted. But given consistent erosion in the elan and authority of the central government itself, the cabinet secretary hasn’t stood up in two of the most public cases of harassment of a brother IAS officer: Ashok Khemka in Haryana, who flagged Robert Vadra’s land deals and Durga Shakti Nagpal, a young sub-divisional magistrate whom the Uttar Pradesh government suspended for standing up for the river Yamuna, barely 15 km from the cabsec’s office in Rashtrapati Bhavan.

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Besides the fact that an IAS officer is virtually defenceless against a revengeful chief minister, the cabinet secretary’s marginalisation has much to do with the trend of giving him a tenure of three years and often more than that as is expedient. In recent cases of BK Chaturvedi and now Ajit Seth, even the three-year tenure has been extended, leaving the incumbent utterly beholden.

Unlike all other civil servants, a near replica of the cabinet secretary’s extension process has been extended to the foreign secretary, defence secretary, home secretary and finance secretary with nearly similar results.

Ditto for the state chief secretaries who head the civil service in their respective states. While the retirement age of 60 is most often respected, nearly every chief secretary has ended up reemployed as a chief information commissioner or as chair of the state human rights commission or a regulator in some form, giving him or her another five years of sinecure.

Mind you, this form of reemployment is absolutely legal; but it creates utter submissiveness as a rule than exception. Some ex-chief secretaries, of course, have morphed into daring regulators, sniping at the political hand that once fed them. But their behaviour while on the chair as chief secretary remains characterised by willingness to crawl when mere bending would have sufficed.

2 Where ministers rule and PM concurs

Parallel in rank to chief secretary – or a multitude of them in various states only because the centre has helplessly looked the other way when states have created several supernumerary positions in the same rank to deflect officers perceived to be tough nuts – are secretaries in the government of India.

Though there are less than a hundred of them enjoying this pay and substantive rank, each one of them is beholden to the generosity of at least one minister of the union who was responsible for “picking them up” from an offer list that the department of personnel and training (DoPT) prepares.

Now what’s wrong with a politically elected person picking up a secretary? Plenty. First, the intended concept of secretary isn’t to make him or her ‘secretary of a minister’. What isn’t often clear is that the exact nomenclature is ‘secretary to the government of India, in xyz ministry’ and not even secretary to the ministry of xyz’, much less ‘secretary to the minister of xyz ministry’. But ever since 2004, when the Vajpayee government was ousted and Manmohan Singh was anointed as PM by his party’s leader, the PM stopped asserting his traditional domain of selecting each secretary to the government of India.

While the appointments committee of the cabinet (ACC) continues to muddle along by circulating the names on offer (NB: the ACC comprising PM, home minister and the minister concerned seldom meets in person; almost every decision is via circulation of notes) the final vote insofar as who gets picked up has slipped away from the PM’s hand. There’s plenty wrong with that. For example, the secretary (and similarly additional secretary, joint secretary, etc below him or her) is today completely beholden to the minister. With this comes a near-zero communication channel with the PM and almost a grudging espirit de corps with cabinet secretary.

A provincial group-think is the inevitable fallout, what with the minister concerned dictating what the ministry’s stance on any matter is and the secretary serving so long as he or she remains far removed from his or her role as a reservoir of administrative wisdom. This has battered another hallowed institution of the civil service, the committee of secretaries (CoS), which has traditionally been a talent pool that has shown rectitude rather than the present spectacle of each secretary sucking up to his minister wielding the remote from the ministry HQ. A weak PM and a still weaker PMO are contributing to the CoS’s demise.

3 Where positions are being auctioned!

If the state chiefs of civil service aren’t willing to bat for their field officers like district magistrates and commissioners, the creation of district ministers in some states and the consistent meddling of uncles and nephews of the political clan in power have made junior officers into chameleons. Rather than be transferred every few weeks and their children dropping out of one school after another, most IAS officers have chosen to become bidders for plum posts.

One set of posts involve control over large budgets. Another set of posts shine out among a heap of asinine jobs in the state capital. It is an open secret that leaders like Mayawati in UP auctioned all such positions. Some officers didn’t just pay an upfront amount; the deal even involved a quarterly retainer just so that they continued to serve as, say, chairperson Noida, with all the trappings and benefits of the state government and a proximity to the national capital too.

Erosion in the office of chief secretary has left many junior IAS officers to develop their own ‘khoonta’ (power base) outside the system with utter disregard to administrative nicety and rule of law. In states like Gujarat, just to name one, the chief minister’s office (CMO) with a set of principal secretaries and daily-wage advisors control nearly everything, leaving the chief secretary as, at best, a titular head of the state’s officialdom. Many chief secretaries would give an arm and a leg to migrate to the centre as a full secretary to GoI, if only a minister picked them up!

Yet another termite eroding the fabric of the all-India services (besides IAS, Indian Police Service-IPS and Indian Forest Service-IFS) is the fact that natives of another state lack instinctive affinity with regional mindsets. While government trains all-India service officers in the language of the state in which he or she has been encadred, and many ‘imports’ have famously acculturated with their adopted state, the politician typically has deeper ties of clan and kinship with the three provincial services corresponding to IAS, IPS and IFS.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing because a PCS, SPS or SFS officer could well be just as judicious, intellectual and empathetic. But his or her structural clash with his corresponding all-India services boss and the stifling lack of upward mobility once the die is cast in an exam that either party cracked when they were just 21 years old is ideally suited for the politician to play state services against their seniors in all-India services.

4 Where private secretaries are writing the rules

Functioning in close similarity to state CMOs is the personal office of ministers of the union. Here the traditional system has been to have a head of the minister’s back office called private secretary (PS) and, in most cases, an officer on special duty (OSD) and an additional PS to support the PS. The PS has invariably been an IAS officer, the choice traditionally left with the minister. With their political proximity and 360-degree exposure to decision-making so early on in their professional lives, PSs have done well for themselves in their onward career. Rahul Khullar, the present chairman of the telecom regulatory authority of India (TRAI), has been a PS. So was Pulok Chatterji, the PM’s principal secretary.

But the unwritten rule has been that the PS would be a relatively junior officer of the rank of deputy secretary or at best director in the government of India. The reason was sound: a junior officer would not start running his minister’s fiefdom. Instead, he would have regard for his seniors in the IAS, who would be joint secretary, additional secretary or secretary in the ministry, as they were folks he would be co-dependent upon all his professional life.

In the Manmohan Singh government, PSs have been picked up among officers far more senior than any other time since 1947. Assertive ministers have ensured that the PM allowed them PSs or OSDs in pay scales of even joint secretary and on a rare occasion additional secretary. This has crushed counter viewpoints among the serving joint secretaries and above in the ordinary chain of command. Also, the preponderance of non-IAS officers in the position of PS and/or OSD isn’t a mere coincidence. Indian revenue service (IRS) officers, for example, are preferred by many ministers because they are adept in handling cash for them just as they couldn’t care two hoots about long-term camaraderie with IAS officers in the traditional hierarchy of the ministry. Their approach is more like shoguns hired to deliver a particular task.

Some obviously view the increasing assertiveness of the elected representative via his PS/OSD as a good thing.

5 Where groupism is rampant

A similar radicalisation of state cadres of the IAS has more often than not created two if not more distinct camps of officers – say those who thrive when AIADMK is in power in Tamil Nadu but wallow in the doghouse under DMK rule. From a politician’s viewpoint, pick-and-choose among babus is the obvious thing to do: as their role when “the other side” was in power is littered with brazenness. Bipartisanship has eroded traditional ties of kinship and increasing commonality of look, feel and attitude between the ruling politico-IAS grouping rather than the two IAS groups inter se.

As pointed out by  in an earlier issue, dalits within the IAS are pushed into a group of their own (please see Policy pariahs: why there are so few SC/ST officers in top echelons).

6 Where noting is the nirvana

Not every officer is a brazen, all-but-card-carrying desperado of one of the two predominant ruling formations. A significant number still prefer to stay neutral. But their utility is decreasing and their deployment in plum positions more often than not is considered an irritant. It is these safety seekers who often end up creating unending note sheets on relatively simple administrative choices. Their paranoia, sometimes justified, relates to vigilance and anti-corruption organisations lest even a genuine and bonafide decision festers gangrene into their careers. The public plays its part in the disarray just as the media does because nearly every decision can be trumped up into a scandal with the benefit of hindsight.

Unlike public interest litigation (PIL), where the judiciary more often than not questions bonafide of the litigant, right to information (RTI) does not demand any such constraint. Political rivals and interest groups have a field day planting RTIs and file notings, particularly those against the current, have gotten genuine administrators into trouble. A more babu-like approach, making the file dance across ministries with noncommittal notes like “Please examine”, is passing off as administrative action. This hurts delivery of public services as well as corporates who need the government’s support to get on with their job.
My proposition therefore is that the hallowed steel frame of India – with the IAS at its helm – stands beaten into utter submission, and corroded beyond repair.

Test case: PC Parakh

The ignominy facing PC Parakh, the well-regarded IAS officer who served as coal secretary between March 2004 and December 2005, is just a case in point. For all ephemeral social media support that came their way, IAS officers like Khemka and Nagpal have had it just as bad. One wonders what wrong Parakh did to deserve a CBI FIR.

A man like him found himself on the hot seat thanks only to Mamata Banerjee, who was coal minister. Parakh learnt that when the file came to Didi for consent she was so busy with electioneering that she didn’t bother who the next coal secretary will be.

Surprised with his selection, the new coal secretary even went to then cabinet secretary Kamal Pande, wondering how he could have made it to such a lucrative position! Pande, the titular head of the service, confined himself to an enigmatic smile.

By May 2005, Parakh found UPA as the political master and the paragon of virtue Shibu Soren as his minister. But in a few weeks the hon’ble koyla mantri was in jail, and Parakh was sending all files directly to Manomohan Singh, who had retained the coal portfolio.

A crucial proposal sent for (prime) ministerial consent was a draft ordinance entailing mandatory competitive bidding for all mines. Nothing came of it. Part of this is explained by Soren’s return as coal minister; but no one, least of all Manmohan Singh, asserted even when Soren left New Delhi to run Jharkhand and the PM reassumed the charge of coal minister.

Instead, the screening committee, which Parakh chaired, was told to continue taking decisions on who got the booty.

Clearly, sifarish letters gave the dubious guys a better chance of wangling a mine compared to what a transparent price discovery process would have entailed. Public sector undertakings, it should go without saying, found the fewest backers.

Today, Parakh is facing question marks for overturning a screening committee’s recommendation in favour of Hindalco, an Aditya Vikram Birla Group company. But he did what he did on the basis of a prime ministerial reference, which in turn was based on written pleas by AV Birla Group chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla. Also, hadn’t the PM’s references been backed by written endorsements from Naveen Patnaik, the chief minister of Odisha, the host state? Plus, wasn’t Parakh’s overturning of the ‘safety via PSU’ policy argued on the basis of a note that the PM (as coal minister in-charge) finally okayed?

A minute’s reflection would show that out of four consenting parties, the corporate and the bureaucrat can’t be the only ones facing the CBI FIR. Either PM and the Odisha CM deserve to be made co-accused, or all four should be deemed to have acted in good faith.

In the hiatus, what with CBI acting as an arbitrator – and the comptroller and auditor general (CAG) failing to take note of Parakh’s draft ordinance on competitive bidding that would have nipped all dubious allotments in the bud – even secretaries to the government of India stand bitten by execution paralysis. So is the committee of secretaries, a group that invariably passes the buck to a group of ministers.

Their reasoning is simple: the fewer decisions one has taken and the longer the merry-go-round that a file takes, the better one’s chances of climbing the ladder or getting a post-retirement regulatory sinecure.

Ditto for not standing up for courageous juniors willing to interpret rules even with an iota of innovation and commitment to get projects off the ground. Now that RTI activist Devashish Bhattacharya has secured an order that all file notings need to clearly reflect the name and designation of every single officer, the fear of being caught with execution bias, like Parakh has been eight years after an event even with the PM of the land in the loop, has only increased.

This master, burdened as she is with monies sunk in winning an election, has little interest in what Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel said to the constituent assembly: “You will not have a united India if you do not have a good all-India Service which has the independence to speak out its mind, which has a sense of security… The Constitution is meant to be worked by a ring of Service, which will keep the country intact.”

A few outward niceties may vary between, say, a Mayawati handling an IAS officer under her, and J Jayalalithaa. But both have been known to make officers cover. Result? Ministers, MLAs, and increasingly ordinary political workers treat IAS officers more like servants than public servants they are meant to be. Supernumerary positions in state cadres – and the centre too, though in relatively lesser measure – has been one more termite attacking the frame.

Time the subterfuge ended, the IAS disbanded and the job given to professional political appointees?