The largesse of the 6th Central Pay Commission (CPC) has been announced and I suppose as a loyal civil servant, one is obliged to make polite noises. By and large the reaction among the civil services is that of smug satisfaction, although hard-worked and harassed as we are, we surely deserved a lot more. More objectively speaking, in an era of 9 per cent growth, a mostly soaring Sensex, and record revenue collections, it is hard to deny the case for improving the pay and working conditions of the civil services.

But this silver lining comes with two important clouds. The first and more widely understood issue relates to the recommendations regarding improving the performance of the services that, going by past experience, are sure to be ignored. The second and less understood issue relates to the relative positions of the various services in the pay fixation sweepstakes. Here, it seems that the 6th CPC will henceforth be regarded as the Manusmriti of the civil services, a scriptural source of divine authority giving sanctity and rationale to the iniquities and injustices of a bureaucratic caste system that is perhaps just as damaging to the well-being of modern India as the original caste system has been.

Overcoming misgivings of their colleagues in the Constituent Assembly, Nehru and Patel retained the colonial bureaucracy and fashioned the All India Services. Their hopes have been belied. The IAS and IPS are in no position today to serve as guardians of the public interest, what to speak of their initial role as catalysts for nation building. Over six decades of independence, the IAS has enthusiastically embraced Kipling’s dictum about power without responsibility; the IPS has internalised Tom Stoppard’s observation about responsibility without power.

... contd.