Bureaucratic reforms: learning from the army

Earlier this year, newspapers were rife with news regarding CSS reforms. There was a range of opinions, with some observers predicting that in the future, candidates will be allocated according to their educational backgrounds whereas others spoke about “initial screening tests” before the exam. Regardless of the proposed approach, there seemed to be a general consensus in favour of reforms with regard to the induction of CSS officers.

But are reforms restricted to the intake of civil servants the solution to our bureaucracy’s inefficiency?

Historically, our civil servants have been educated at the best institutions in Pakistan and abroad. Even today, despite of all the notoriety associated with it, CSS remains the profession of choice for the crème of our most prestigious educational institutions.

Compare this to the intake in our armed forces. The bulk of the officer cadets in our military come from rural areas and low to middle socio-economic backgrounds. The rest come from military and cadet colleges. One rarely finds an army officer who has been educated at well-known elite private schools. If it was merely about recruiting people with the best educational backgrounds, then our civilian bureaucracy would have outperformed the military by a big margin. If scoring well in a written examination — be it specialised or not — was a predictor of performance, the military with its requirement of a minimum of 60% marks in intermediate exams would have never been able to outperform Harvard and Warwick-educated civil servants.

What then, one wonders, is the reason behind our ill-functioning bureaucracy?

The civil service, like most of our institutions, is a legacy of the British Raj. For a short period after Independence, it was regarded as an impartial and apolitical state institution, and civil servants were provided protection of tenure and merit-based promotions. Due to a lack of political continuity in the early years after Independence, the bureaucracy was the driving force in the country and bureaucrats served as prime ministers and presidents. Until 1958, CSPs were sent to Oxford and Cambridge for a one-year training programme. These CSPs played a key role in Ayub Khan’s Green Revolution and proved their worth.

And in 1972, the PPP government instituted CSS reforms which shook the entire structure of the CSS. Dr Ishrat Hussain, on these reforms, said, “The federal and provincial secretaries and additional secretaries could be retired from the service without assigning any reason. Summary procedure was introduced… The reforms curtailed the autonomy and supremacy of CSP… The out of turn promotion policy introduced as a result of these reforms prompted ambitious civil servants to align themselves closely with politicians in the ruling party.” And thus we embarked on the road that has resulted in a bureaucracy that is generally regarded as inefficient, ineffective and self-serving. The day-to-day operations and functioning of the army, however, remained free from political interference and hence the army was able to uphold its meritocratic and apolitical promotion system.

Concurrently, in-service training has been neglected in the civil services. Any officer who is posted as an instructor in the civil services is looked down upon. On the contrary, the army focuses on in-service training of its officers, and only the brightest officers are posted as instructors in different training institutions. It was due to its continuous training programmes that the army was able to quickly adapt to counterinsurgency warfare while still maintaining its conventional force structure. However, a lack of focus on training in the civil services has rendered them unable to adapt to changing needs.

Perhaps the solution to our bureaucratic worries lies in addressing the challenges surrounding the lack of meritocracy and absence of long-term human development policy rather than reforms restricted to induction. What good is in inducting the best officers when the system is going to rust their intellect?

Published in The Express Tribune, December 4^th, 2019.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.