Not without Merit
ample this conversation from the book, Yes Minister, between Dr. Cartwright, a bureaucrat, and Right Honourable Jim Hacker, minister, department of Administrative Affairs.
“I’m a professional economist,” he explained. “Director of Local Administrative Statistics.”
“So you were in charge of Local Government Directorate until we took over?”
He smiled at my question.
“Dear me, no.” He shook his head sadly, though apparently without bitterness.
“No, I’m just Under Secretary rank. Sir Gordon Reid was the permanent secretary. I fear that I will rise no higher.”
I asked why not.
He smiled.
“Alas! I’m an expert.”
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Image: Vikas Khot
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POWER TO THE SPECIALISTS: Former civil servant Shailesh Pathak wants top posts to be assigned based on expertise, not seniority | |
They say all analogies are imperfect, yet the reason 45-year-old Shailesh Pathak resigned from the prestigious Indian Administrative Service (IAS) in 2007, bears an uncanny resemblance to Dr. Cartwright’s last comment.
“The reason [to resign] was simple. I wanted to spend the rest of my life in infrastructure financing and execution. And I realised that being a generalist kind of a job, the IAS could not permit me to do that,” says Pathak.
Pathak, a 1990 batch officer, graduated from Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta, in 1986. He spent a lot of time associated with the infrastructure sector during his stint with the government. He served as Managing Director of the Madhya Pradesh State Infrastructure Development Corporation as well as the Secretary in the Public Works Department (PWD). In 2000, he was selected as one of the 15 emerging leaders in India for the Eisenhower Fellowship and went on to study infrastructure and governance in the US. Later, in 2003, he visited the European Union to study their institutions.
Currently he is the senior director at ICICI Venture in Mumbai and heads the Infrastructure division.
Lobbying for Effectiveness
Pathak’s case epitomises a basic problem with the way government-sponsored projects are administered: Leadership positions are typically assigned based on seniority, not knowledge of the sector. As a result, actual implementation of projects is the weakest aspect of governance in India.
A recent McKinsey report titled Building India: Accelerating Infrastructure Projects also points out that it is not financing, but poor implementation that is the real hurdle in India’s infrastructure growth.
And that is what Pathak and a group of likeminded people in the civil services hope to change.
Before he quit the civil services, Pathak formed IIM-G, an informal grouping of ‘IIM graduates in government services’. It represents a group of people with a proven track record and is a resource available within the government for projects where effective delivery is important. Today it has over 100 members.
“IIM-G just hopes that the selection mechanism will become more output oriented,” says Bharat Salhotra, a 1988 batch officer of the Indian Railway Accounts Service and an alumnus of IIM Calcutta and the Sloan School of Management. He is currently General Manager (Finance) and the Chief Information Officer for the Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation (DFCCIL) in New Delhi.
However, both Pathak and Salhotra are quick to explain that IIM-G is not asking for any special assignments for its members. It is only making a case for looking beyond seniority and hierarchy when appointing heads of infrastructure projects, both social and physical.
They believe that ideally one should be allowed to have a crack at any such top job, irrespective of whether one is from within the government or outside it. That idea comes from Pathak’s experience during the Eisenhower Fellowship when he witnessed “tremendous mobility between business, government, and academia in the US.”
But such a radical change is not going to happen overnight. “So the logical way is to begin by throwing open competition from within the government, irrespective of the service and batch. Once this gains ground, at a later stage, even people from the private sector could be allowed to compete,” says Pathak.
B.S. Baswan, director of the Indian Institute of Public Administration (IIPA) and a 1967 batch IAS officer welcomes such a move. “It’s really not an anathema to the government. It is true that our delivery systems are weak and there are flaws in our public policy,” he says.
What is wrong with the current setup?
Salhotra cites the case of the much vaunted Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) which was conceptualised in 2004 and the initial deadline was 2012-13. However, the revised completion date has shifted to 2017-18. Costs have gone up so much that the internal rate of return is near negative. According to his estimates, each day’s delay costs the DFC close to Rs. 70 crore.
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