What is the Colonial Baggage in the Civil Services?
““...Civil servants considered decision-making to be a rational activity in which they determine a goal based on public interest, develop all alternatives to achieve the goal...””
On the first day of my district training, Premchand, the Administrative Officer (then called Huzur Sheristadar) in the Collectorate, told me that the procedures of district administration were more than 100 years old and had been worked out by an Englishman, Richard Tottenham. Smugly, he continued that the system was so perfect that no one was able to come up with a better one.
This shows how colonialism continues to shape the workings of the civil services. So, what are the origins of the source code of such colonial influences on the civil services?
Prior to Independence, the structure was based on the principles laid out by sociologist Max Weber. Some key features are:
Posts are arranged in the form of a pyramid in which junior officers report to those senior in rank;
Seniority is determined by the number of years of service put in;
Depending on their seniority each officer has a given task with a clear division of work; and
Impersonal, written rules govern the conduct of officers in these positions, and security in service is provided to officers who perform their duties competently.
This continued after Independence, even in the face of increasing evidence that change was required. In one of the early reports on the civil services after India’s independence, Appleby (1953) noted that, first, the IAS, in the mold of a classical Weberian bureaucracy, always tried to find a “wholly scientific or technical and wholly right decision”.
Second, it conceived program planning to be a “mechanical, merely technical, unvarying” activity.
In other words, civil servants considered decision-making to be a rational activity in which they determine a goal based on public interest, develop all alternatives to achieve the goal, and finally select an alternative that is most likely to lead to goal achievement. In this way of working, politics (and peoples’ participation) is an externality, a sort of “interference”.
The result is that little effort is made by civil servants to learn skills of ethical political engagement (and people’s involvement) in decision-making and implementation.
This lodestar of the civil services - political neutrality – inadvertently made them equate “political neutrality” with “program neutrality”. In true Weberian style, the assumption was that goal achievement was unconnected to the enthusiasm (passion and persistence) of civil servants towards specific social and economic goals. These basic principles continue to determine the way of working of civil services even in the face of increasing calls for change, both from within and outside.
From within, there was an acknowledgment that political engagement was required for civil servants’ effectiveness. While narrating his experiences of higher levels of administration, Former Home Secretary L. P. Singh (1971) brought this out succinctly - “practically all government is politics – anything you do has political implication”, and “unless you keep on studying political behavior and problems relating to the political institutions functioning in the country and at least some other countries, I think, you can never make a first-rate civil servant”.
Finally, he said that “many of the grievances of the civil servant about the functioning of our political system arise from too idealistic view of public affairs and in non-recognition of the fact that after all politics is concerned with power.”
Externally, calls were made for civil servants to infuse themselves with passion and empathy for people. Nehru in his address to the Fourth Annual General Body Meeting of the Institute of Public Administration made this point, “In a period of dynamic growth, however, we want as civil servants persons who are not … merely headclerks but people with minds, people with vision, people with a desire to achieve, who have some initiative for doing a job and who can think how to do it. But the person who is completely neutral is a head clerk and no more … Can a person be neutral, I ask you, about basic things which we stand for, our state stands for, our Plan stands for ...”
Later, Indira Gandhi (1970), spoke of commitment and passion towards equity goals in her address to the Institute of Engineers, “unreserved faith in the programs they (civil servants) administer … We must all have a commitment to the development of the country and a sense of personal involvement with the welfare of our people.”
It is not the case that the civil service has remained unchanged since Independence. Some examples of change include the rapid spread of development administration during the 1970s and the incorporation of some practices from New Public Management (e.g. citizen charters) after 1991.
However, these changes are more in the nature of chipping of the Weberian model to suit changing settings, not a well-thought-of, system-wide transformation.
This is the colonial baggage!
