Parley: Should lateral entry in civil services be encouraged?

What is the need for hiring people from outside the IAS (Indian Administrative Service)?

Ashok Vardhan Shetty: We definitely need expertise. Nobody objects to hiring experts as advisors or as consultants. What is objectionable is hiring people as Deputy Secretaries, Directors, and Joint Secretaries because these are administrative posts, they are secretarial posts; an expert is not suited for these kinds of posts. The combined civil services exam is one of the toughest. Last year, out of 13 lakh applicants, only 1,016 were selected, of which about 180 were selected for the IAS. People go through this tough exam and then put in nine years of service to become a Deputy Secretary in the Central Secretariat, they put in 12 years to become a Director, and at least 16 years to become a Joint Secretary. Lateral entrants, on the other hand, will walk in on the basis of a resume and a half-an-hour interview.

Harsh Shrivastava: The advertised posts for about disaster management, semiconductors, FinTech, investment, emerging tech… they are very specialised posts. Regular officers may not have this expertise. I would like to differentiate between implementation and policymaking. These officers who are being hired as lateral entrants are for policymaking; that is where their expertise is needed. For implementation, which is typically in the State and not in the Union government, you would need IAS officers who are generalists.

Ashok Vardhan Shetty: It is not true that policymaking is separate from implementation; they are intimately connected. You cannot make good policy unless you also have experience of implementation. When policymaking is divorced from implementation, you end up making airy-fairy policies, which will flop.

You must also look at what happened in Pakistan. In 1972, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto set up an administrative reforms commission which said the same things — that the civil services of Pakistan is full of generalists, and what we need is specialisation. So, Bhutto said, lateral entry is necessary. And he started appointing party people, party loyalists, in posts from Deputy Secretary to Secretary. After he fell from power, General Zia Haq dismissed Bhutto’s appointees. But he started inducting military people through lateral entry into the Pakistan civil service. Today, the Pakistan civil service is a mess.

Lateral entry, by whatever name it is called, is just a euphemism for the spoils system. That is, political parties trying to favour their partypersons under the guise of bringing in specialists. I don’t mind if these people appear for a tough written test on their domain of expertise and then go through a rigorous interview. But selecting them purely on the basis of their resume and conducting an interview is very dangerous. Even if it is done properly in the initial few years, in the long run, it is bound to degenerate into a spoils system. Political loyalties, cronyism, nepotism, and corruption will creep in.

What would you suggest to prevent such a crony system from taking root?

Harsh Shrivastava: This argument can be extended to anything. What is to stop the UPSC, when it conducts interviews of IAS aspirants, from looking at their ideological leanings and leaving out people who are not ideologically aligned?

Also, nowadays, we know everything about everybody. We have LinkedIn profiles, social media feeds. If the UPSC took somebody who had nothing to do with semiconductors as the Joint Secretary for semiconductors, I’m sure questions will be asked, PILs will be filed, and the Supreme Court will hold the UPSC chairperson in contempt.

Ashok Vardhan Shetty: An interview alone is insufficient to test expertise. The recent case of Puja Khedkar is an example of why the interview can be misleading. She scored more marks in the interview than most IAS toppers. The UPSC interview board could not spot that she was faking her identity. So, an interview alone is not a reliable guide of expertise of a person’s attitude and personality.

At what ranks do you think it would be most suitable to bring in people from outside?

Ashok Vardhan Shetty: Either you select people at the entry level through a tough competitive exam or you should bring in lateral entrants at the Secretary level. At the highest level, if you bring in somebody like a Manmohan Singh or a V. Krishnamurty or a M.S. Swaminathan, there is no problem because their expertise is beyond doubt. But at the mid-level, the expertise of the person is open to question. I’m not ruling out the possibility of someone like a Bill Gates or a Mark Zuckerberg doing wonderful things in their 20s and 30s, but those are not the kinds of people who are going to apply for the posts of Director, Deputy Secretary, and Joint Secretary in government.

Harsh Shrivastava: I would say at the Joint Secretary level because they have experience and can be of help in policymaking. The point of being an officer and not a consultant is that you have the authority of getting something done and you can direct people beneath you and you are responsible to the people above you. Somebody who has worked in a top company, assuming they want to take a salary cut and join the government, would bring a certain style of working, of conducting meetings, of not just going through endless rounds of papers and not taking a decision. They will get things done and make out-of-box suggestions. We should learn from some companies about how they take on board outsiders as seniors.

The reason the policy was actually rolled back was the Opposition’s accusation that the government was bypassing reservations for lateral entry hires. Is the Opposition right?

Harsh Shrivastava: No. First, the government did not say, ‘We were hiring 500 officers every year and now we will hire only 455 officers under the existing reservations and will take 45 directly.’ These are additional officers. Second, the government could have said that at least in one third of these seats, preference will be given to women or SCs and STs. But these are additions. They are not going to take away existing jobs.

Ashok Vardhan Shetty: I beg to differ. These are not additional posts. These posts are carved out of the existing posts of Joint Secretary, Director, and Deputy Secretary. They are affecting the promotion prospects of existing career bureaucrats. In fact, during the UPA (United Progressive Alliance)-2 government, there was a recommendation that 10% of the total posts be earmarked for lateral entry. Of course, it was never acted upon.

Regarding reservations, there are already standard norms saying there is 15% reservation for SCs, 7.5% for STs, 27% for OBCs, and 10% for EWS (economically weaker sections), among other classes. The Department of Personnel and Training’s own instructions are that reservations must apply for any post, even if it is a contractual post, if it is of more than 45 days duration. These posts are three years to five years. So, reservations should have applied to them.

But there is another provision which says if it is a standalone post, or what they call a single-post cadre, reservations need not apply. This applies to situations where there is one post of Vice Chancellor or one MD of a public sector undertaking. The UPSC has treated each of these Joint Secretary, Director, and Deputy Secretary posts as subject-specific, and through this narrow definition, it has converted non-standalone posts into standalone posts and then called them as single-post cadres and not applied reservation.

The government at the highest level has realised that there is a problem here. So, the Minister for Personnel, Jitendra Singh, wrote to the UPSC saying the government would like to re-examine this matter, which I think was the right thing to do. Otherwise, theoretically, each post’s job description is unique, so you can always argue that every post is a stand-alone post and reservations won’t apply.

Listen to the conversation in The Hindu Parley podcast