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When India will abolish IAS ?
Rupak Banerjee
When India will abolish IAS ?
PHOTO : Chhattisgarh's IAS officer Jagdish Sonkar made himself 'famous' by putting shoes into hospital bed. TIWN

Some people say IAS stands for 'Idiotic, Arrogant, Suckers' ...then some would say IAS itself was a creation by British for producing top notch 'bootlicking' servants. There was no reason for this colonial bureaucracy to exist in independent India, but even assuming it was needed for a few years, there is absolutely no need any longer.

Chhattisgarh's IAS officer Jagdish Sonkar, whose picture with a leg on a hospital bed and talking to a patient like a British Lord during an inspection has again proved that IAS indeed made many ordinary people into ignorant (powerful) babus whose contbution to society is NIL.

Important question is why India needs IAS ?  Many eminent personalities from President Abdul Kalam to Infosys founder N.D.Narayanmurthy pointed out India's backwardness due to sloth IAS and babudom.

For a country accustomed to gloating about GDP growth figures and taking these as a measure of achievement, here is sobering advice from NR Narayana Murthy, founder of Infosys Technologies, India’s second-largest infotech firm.

Infosys founder Narayanmurthy said, "Stop focussing exclusively on 8 or 8.5% growth, look at the sorry state of affairs on the governance front, he said at a gathering in Delhi few years back.

Drawing a contrast between the success of the private sector and the decay and corruption in the government sector, he said: “In areas where public governance is involved, we have hardly made any progress.”

Murthy said the politicians and bureaucrats are trapped in a colonial mindset. “They feel they are the masters and there is no need to show fairness and transparency,” he said.

Murthy, seen as an idealist by many, owns less than 5% of the total shares of Infosys. 

While admitting to some exceptions, he noted many of the leaders and bureaucrats were completely out of touch with the dynamics of the current world. “Once I was with a senior bureaucrat discussing how badly our high school students had performed in an international competition and he said, ‘we must stop participating in such competitions’,” he said.

The outdated mentality of the political class, he said, is accentuated by an equally apathetic population, which has almost accepted corruption and inefficiency. “For over 1,000 years, the government belonged to someone sitting either 2,000 miles or 4,000 miles away. There is no sense of societal ownership,” he said. “The penalty (for corruption) is minimal. As a result, there is no fear of repercussions and there is no accountability.”

Murthy’s cure, besides tougher punishment, is to abolish the system of generalised administrators under the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and replace it with specialists under a new ‘Indian Management Service’.

The new breed of government servants would have specialised knowledge to manage projects. Their salaries must also be increased to ‘near private sector’ levels, while making 60% of their remuneration variable according to how well they are able to implement projects. “If we had kept track of the activities using a project management software, we would not be where we are,” he said, about the delays in setting up the Commonwealth Games infrastructure.

Continuing with the British imperial services was a wise decision in 1947. However, these services are fundamentally incapable of innovation and efficient delivery of the limited functions that a government should perform.
 
The only effective alternative to tenured, unaccountable, inefficient (and being poorly paid, often corrupt) services is market-based recruitment by the head of a department, with all senior roles being on contract. This would allow rapid intake of competent people into the civil services (from across the world, in some cases), and termination without recourse should there be either inefficiency, lack of innovation or (worse) corruption.
 
In the past, India has struggled through extreme forms of socialism which distorted production incentives and productivity. These distortions have somewhat alleviated after the liberalisation of 1991, although there is much more to do.
 
However, India remains fundamentally ill-equipped to deliver any public policy outcome or service.

The biggest drag on India is the IAS and all-India services, as well as associated tenured civil services at the central and state levels. No private organisation will ever survive if tenure were promised. 

Tripura's babudom is no better either as well known tainted IAS officials like GSG Ayayngar occupying plum post of Principal Secretary, most of the IAS officers sulking Tripura's economy by making wrong policy decisions.

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