The Hota Report concedes the problem. “We are... aware that reforming the higher civil service is no substitute for reforming governmental processes and administrative structures. When citizen interface is substantially with the junior functionaries of government, there are obvious limits to achieving citizen-centric governance through reforms of higher civil service alone. Nevertheless, it is our hope that the principles emphasised in our Report will be taken to the cutting edge level. To ensure citizen-centric governance, many of the recommendations of our Report have gone beyond the higher civil service and touched upon the basic structures of the governmental machinery.”

Most of these recommendations, however, are prescriptive in nature. They give directions to various government departments to be good: be more responsive, transparent and citizen friendly. This is much in line with the prevalent brahminical mode of thought wherein giving advice is deemed to be a superior thing to actually doing things. Little wonder that such advice is routinely ignored by the line departments.

At present, all these officers, including the IAS, are assessed on the basis of their ability to meet budgetary norms of expenditure. Anyone can spend money: the point is to do something concrete and to complete a project. Perhaps the basic reform that is needed is for the IAS officers to be made project leaders, sharply focussed on one particular project: ‘your task is to do this project in a predefined time’. Once such a project-based approach is followed in the civil service it would go a long way to ensure that the civil servants focus on achieving results rather than enumerating the obstacles that lie in the way of achieving results. Skill upgradation or even moral upliftment in the absence of pressure to deliver, cannot hope to achieve much.

... contd.