The IAS also appears to be traversing an identity crisis of sorts. It is now settled wisdom that over the past fifty years, we have had too much of governance and controls in the economic domain, while too little has been done in areas like public health, education, women's empowerment and local self-government. The focus of government has to adapt to rapid change, in line with changes in the economic environment and the compulsions of a networked world. The civil services in India have been famously mired in paradigms of the past, with a predominant culture of conformity, and little incentive for innovation.

How can the civil services reinvent themselves? Or is it time that services like the IAS prepared the ground for their extinction, inthe national interest?

Whatever may have been the shortcomings and the well-caricatured failures of the IAS, it cannot be denied that it has served as a disinterested and largely upright bulwark of administration, especially in the districts, with its feet firmly planted in the rural realities of India. It has served to promote continuity, national integration and a certain uniformity of approach. There is also no shortage of talent in the IAS. Since little can be gained by wishing away the bureaucracy in a country of India's size, what then should be done to convert the civil service into an effective instrument of governance?

Perhaps a fundamental transition required is to convert the structure. Bureaucracies are famously resistant to change, but a fundamental reinvention will become absolutely necessary -- what with the compulsions of the cyber-age, the integration of the global economy and the rapidly altering new rules of economic and commercial transactions. This transition will have to be led bythe younger elements in the bureaucracy, on account of their adaptability and their greater stake in reform. The bureaucracy may have to undergo a cultural revolution of sorts, with the focus of the incentive system being shifted from conformity and uniformity, towards encouraging innovation, adaptability, and change. The rapidity with which the British Civil Service is embracing beneficial change and even fundamental structural transformation should serve as an eye opener. The present system of officers being evaluated by bureaucratic and political superiors also needs to be rethought, in line with current innovations in the private sector, where the opinions of peers and one's clientele also count for evaluating an individual. The rigid seniority-mandated hierarchy of the IAS can also perhaps be recast, with the creation of functionally independent streams within the service.

The civil service also needs to shed its paternalistic attitudes and to learn to work in a participatory mode -- with the privatesector, with citizens' organisations, and with local self-government institutions. If the IAS has to have any degree of relevance in the future, it should spearhead the efforts undertaken in various states towards decentralisation. Good governance can only flourish in a milieu of subsidiarity, where the functions of administration are carried out at the lowest feasible levels.

The bureaucracy also has to prepare itself for the impending wave of electronic governance and e-commerce, despite the poor levels of computer penetration in India. These tools and systems provide a splendid opportunity to effect transparency and greater accountability in government, and to improve the speed and the quality of delivery of public services to the citizen. The spread of telecommunications in the Eighties, of the STD telephone booths, have transformed the quality and mode of transactions in our villages. It is only prudent to anticipate and to prepare for a similar wave of Internet-driven kiosks all over the country inthe next few years.

A belated attempt has also to be made to redress the relative neglect of vital areas like primary education and public health, by reorienting the bureaucracy towards these directions. The civil service needs to build up strong competence in these sectors, norms have also to be evolved for measuring objectives and performance, against which attainments can be measured by the public. There is an invisible caste system within the IAS, especially at the senior levels, with jobs in economic administration being more coveted. This bias needs to be corrected.

More than anything else, the civil service has to take the initiative for simplifying the business of administration. We have some of the most convoluted procedures in the world. The higher bureaucracy needs to take the initiative for effecting transparency in procedures, and in assisting the legislature to simplify and modernise rules. Simultaneously, the participation of the citizen in the design and implementation of schemes andprojects is the only lasting way to ensure success.

Many members of the IAS bemoan their helplessness in the face of the intransigence of the system. But matters will certainly improve if an organised initiative for change emanates from within the civil services. Unless this initiative is seized without delay, the IAS will continue to be trapped in outmoded paradigms, and increasingly perceived as a bothersome irrelevance.

The writer is an IAS officer from Kerala