Umpteen commissions on civil service reforms

Unless the two sides come to consensus on problems of the civil service, no commission can reverse the downward trend

Civil service reforms have been making the headlines. A host of measures have been proposed recently such as directory retirement rules, performance contracts, revised promotion rules, a new rotation policy and creation of National Executive Service. Most of these ideas however have been proposed in the past in some form or the other. In fact, civil service reforms have been quite popular with successive governments ever since the creation of Pakistan.

In 1948, the Justice Munir Commission introduced salary cuts. In 1958, the Administrative Reorganization Committee created the present-day Section Officer system in the secretariat. Justice Cornelius also headed two successive bodies in 1959 and 1969 and proposed some restructuring measures but those were never implemented. In 1970s, the National Pay Commission and the Administrative Reform Committee, under the socialist influence, created 22 unified pay grades that have lasted ever since.

All these changes however happened without much dilution in bureaucratic powers on ground until the Law Reforms Ordinance of 1972, when the magistrates were stripped of the powers of committal proceedings and public prosecutors took up the gatekeeping function. This was later validated by a Supreme Court judgment in 1996, separating executive from judiciary and limiting the powers of executive magistrates.

Then in 2001, General Musharraf’s devolution scheme altogether transformed the civil service functioning in districts. The Deputy Commissioners were divested of the so-called benign executive magistracy powers and the prestigious title of ‘DC’ that they have held since the British era. This was a massive blow to the civil service and especially the all-powerful District Management Group. Many thought it would be the end of civil service as they knew it.

But the resilient steel structure created by the British did not crumble. Instead it metamorphosed into a new form, which perhaps was more suited to modern day needs and also much more powerful. Under the politically elected Nazims, the District Coordination Officers became directly responsible for 13 departments and started enjoying executive powers over offices like works, education and health, over which they had only been exercising informal influence. Once the politically elected local governments were gone, the DCOs became even more powerful. This system however was reversed later and the DCOs were transformed back to DCs, with much lesser powers.

Besides the Pakistan Administrative Service, other service groups were also subjected to numerous changes over the years, such as massive reforms in police under the Police Order of 2002 and transformation of the Income Tax group into the Inland Revenue Service.

In parallel, the ambition of civil service reforms lingered on. The National Commission of Government Reforms presented its findings in 2008 but were not implemented. Under the PML-N government, Ahsan Iqbal was given the task to reform the civil service and many of the proposed measures that we see today such as performance contracting were proposed during his time but could not be implemented. Most recently, the PTI government also created two task forces on civil service reforms, a pay and pension committee and a cabinet committee on institutional reforms.

Notwithstanding these umpteen commissions and committees, the civil service structure has only deteriorated with time. The civil servants feel that they are inadequately compensated, held overly accountable and face a host of external pressures that prevent them from doing their job. On the other hand, the politicians believe that civil servants have become increasingly non-responsive to their needs, delay implementation of their decisions and have a vested interest to resist change.

These diametrically opposite views however are the primary reason why these reforms failed to make a dent. Unless and until the two sides come to a consensus on problems and remedies of the civil service, no number of commissions can reverse the downward trend in civil services.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 24^th, 2020.

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