Gresham’s Law says bad money drives out good money. Since I am an optimistic kind of blighter, I’ve an Alagh law: good ideas eventually drive out bad ones. I once chaired a group which wrote a report on higher civil service recruitment and training. It took a year-and-a-half and the country’s best and brightest helped us. Some of it was implemented and some not. The latter included lowering the age at first entrance, changing over from a Macaulay kind of testing procedure to finding out the candidate’s aptitude and skills for a civil service career in the 21st century and a lifetime training programme. The last one was implemented. The earlier two were not. One does not know why — the report remained a classified document and I was not given access to it later when I wanted it for some work — but now someone’s put it on the Internet. Dr Moily read the reports and gracefully

acknowledged and endorsed the recommendations in the reports of the Administrative Reforms Commission he chaired, beginning with the Tenth Report. And they’ve been raised again by the chairman of the UPSC in the inaugural UPSC Foundation Day Lecture Series earlier this month.

The lowering of the age of first entrance is a serious matter. The idea of giving as many chances as possible to certain sections of the population arises out of a concern that poor children should have a level playing field. I am a great

believer in having candidates from poor families in the civil service, and fully endorse the point that my former colleague Ram Vilas Paswan often makes: a collector or SP of SC/ ST origin makes more difference to outcomes than a minister. Also in JNU, I have seen how the best and brightest could come from very poor families, if you had the patience and were fair. But the percentage of candidates from poor SC/ ST families coming from backward areas was unfortunately declining — a matter of great concern. The Zakir Hussain Centre of Educational Research at JNU was asked to find out; they reported that the cost of preparing for the exams could be quite high — in fact above a lakh of rupees a year in the urban areas they surveyed. Poor children cannot pay this cost, so drop out. It was children from better-off sections who could take advantage of the age relaxations. But there was a sunny side. My experience of JNU showed that when you do a fair selection and take only a few — in JNU tens of thousands applied and only nine hundred were taken — then, at the national level, you get many extraordinary candidates at lower ages. In the civil services lakhs of candidates apply so the choice is even wider. At each point in the scale you get many candidates. Therefore one would get very good candidates at younger ages, from genuinely poor families, from backward regions. Some allowance has to be made for candidates from rural and backward areas, but very old entrants become a drag.

... contd.