Civil Services in India

What the Civil Service Is For

A civil service exists to supply a democracy with something elections cannot: continuity, expertise and impartiality. Governments change, and the state must go on collecting revenue, running schools and maintaining order through the change. The constitutional design of the Indian services is an attempt to secure that continuity without creating a body so independent that it escapes democratic control, and every controversy in this topic, neutrality, tenure, lateral entry, politicisation, is a dispute about where that balance should sit.

Constitutional Provisions

Part XIV of the Constitution deals with services under the Union and the states, and the provisions are unusually detailed for a constitution, which itself tells us how central the framers thought the question was.

• Article 309 empowers the appropriate legislature to regulate the recruitment and conditions of service of persons appointed to public services and posts, with the President or Governor competent to make rules until it does. Because legislatures have rarely legislated, service rules in India are overwhelmingly executive rules made under the proviso.
• Article 310 provides that members of the All India Services, the central services and holders of posts under the Union hold office during the pleasure of the President, and their state counterparts during the pleasure of the Governor.
• Article 311 qualifies that pleasure with two protections: no civil servant may be dismissed or removed by an authority subordinate to the appointing authority; and none may be dismissed, removed or reduced in rank except after an inquiry in which he has been informed of the charges and given a reasonable opportunity of being heard.
• Article 312 governs the creation of All India Services.
• Articles 315 to 323 establish the Union and State Public Service Commissions, prescribe their composition, tenure and functions, and protect their independence.

Pleasure and Its Limits

The relationship between Articles 310 and 311 is the constitutional expression of the central problem of this topic. Pleasure keeps the service ultimately answerable to the elected executive, which is what prevents a self-governing bureaucracy. The procedural protections prevent that pleasure being exercised capriciously, which is what makes a career service and therefore impartial advice possible.

The same protections that shield an honest officer from victimisation make removal for incompetence slow and contested, which is why dismissal is effectively unavailable as a management tool and the entire burden of quality falls on recruitment, probation and posting. Any proposal to weaken Article 311 must answer the question of what would then protect an officer who refuses an improper instruction.

Article 312 and the Creation of an All India Service

Article 312 provides a deliberately difficult route. Before a new All India Service can be created, the Council of States, because that House represents the states and is expected to protect their interest, must declare by a resolution supported by a special majority of not less than two-thirds of the members present and voting that it is necessary or expedient in the national interest. Parliament may then create the service by an ordinary law, passed by simple majority in both Houses.

At independence there were two All India Services, the Indian Administrative Service and the Indian Police Service. The Indian Forest Service was created in 1966, bringing the number to three. That the route runs through the states' own chamber is the constitutional answer to the federal objection: the states cannot be given a common service without their House consenting by a large majority.

The All India Judicial Service

The 42nd Amendment (1976) added an all-India judicial service to Article 312, so that it can be created by the same route as any All India Service: a resolution of the Council of States supported by two-thirds of the members present and voting, followed by a law of Parliament. Article 312(3) excludes any post inferior to that of district judge as defined in Article 236, and Article 312(4) allows the creating law to amend the chapter on subordinate courts without being treated as an amendment of the Constitution under Article 368. The idea was recommended by the Law Commission as early as its fourteenth report (1958) and has been revived repeatedly, but the service has not been created.

• For. Recruitment of district judges by open national competition would raise the quality of the trial courts, where most citizens meet the judiciary. A national pool would help fill the large number of vacancies that delay justice. It would widen the social base of the judiciary, with reservation applied nationally, and it would create a body of tested judges for elevation to the High Courts, widening the field from which the collegium chooses.
• Against. Articles 233 to 235 vest the appointment of district judges in the Governor in consultation with the High Court and give the High Courts control over the subordinate courts, so the service would shift control away from the High Courts, several of which oppose it, and from the states. District courts work in the regional language and apply local laws and customs, which an officer from another state would take years to learn. States fear losing preference for their own residents, and members of the state judicial services fear reduced prospects of promotion to district judge.
• Independence. If the executive controlled recruitment, posting or discipline, the service would weaken the independence of the subordinate judiciary. Any design consistent with the separation of the judiciary from the executive must keep recruitment under judicial supervision and leave control over postings and discipline with the High Courts.

On timely justice the honest answer is that the service addresses one cause of delay, unfilled posts and uneven quality at the district level, and leaves the others untouched: the ratio of judges to population, adjournments, the volume of government litigation, procedural law and court infrastructure. It would help, but it would not solve the problem by itself, and it cannot be created without the cooperation of the states and the High Courts whose control it would alter. Nor does it touch the dispute between the Supreme Court and the Union over appointments to the higher judiciary, which is a question of the collegium rather than of recruitment.

Grievance Redressal for Civil Servants

The conduct rules bar civil servants from criticising government policy in public and from bringing outside influence to bear on their service matters, so the state owes them channels through which their grievances can be heard. The machinery has four layers.

• Departmental remedies. Representations to the superior authority, and appeal, revision and review under the Central Civil Services (Classification, Control and Appeal) Rules, 1965, and the All India Services (Discipline and Appeal) Rules, 1969, with a memorial to the President as the last departmental step.
• Constitutional protection. Article 311 guarantees an inquiry, with notice of the charges and a reasonable opportunity of being heard, before dismissal, removal or reduction in rank.
• Administrative tribunals. Article 323A, inserted by the 42nd Amendment (1976), and the Administrative Tribunals Act, 1985, created the Central Administrative Tribunal and allowed state tribunals for service disputes, so that these would be settled quickly by a specialised body. The Act requires an employee normally to exhaust departmental remedies first. Since L. Chandra Kumar (1997) a tribunal's order can be challenged before a High Court.
• Joint consultation. The Joint Consultative Machinery (1966), with councils at national and departmental levels and compulsory arbitration on pay, hours of work and leave, handles the collective grievances of central employees.

Assessment. The mechanism is extensive on paper and weak in operation, which is why grievance redressal has been called the weakest link in civil service management. Departmental appeals are decided within the hierarchy complained against and are slow. The tribunals carry heavy pendency, and the added tier of the High Court after L. Chandra Kumar has lengthened litigation, with the government itself a frequent appellant. The joint councils meet irregularly. Officers therefore turn to the courts and, increasingly, to the media and social media. Airing grievances in public breaches the conduct rules and erodes the anonymity on which neutrality depends, so the remedy lies not only in discipline but in internal channels that are quick and credible: time limits for deciding representations, independent grievance officers within departments, and disposal of tribunal cases within fixed periods. A disclosure of wrongdoing in the public interest is a different matter from a personal grievance, and falls under the Whistle Blowers Protection Act, 2014, rather than the service machinery.

The Classification of Services

All India Services

Members are recruited by the Centre but deployed in the states, where transfer, promotion, pay and postings are regulated by the state government. They serve under a state cadre for most of their careers while their cadre control, disciplinary authority in the last resort, and empanelment for central posts rest with the Union.

Central Services

Members are recruited by the Centre and, though they may be posted in the states, they work for the Centre, with transfer and conditions of service regulated by it. The Indian Foreign Service, the Indian Revenue Service, the Indian Audit and Accounts Service, the Indian Railway services and the rest fall here. They are classified into Group A and Group B, with Groups C and D covering the subordinate services.

	All India Services	Central Services
Recruited by	The Centre	The Centre
Serve	In the states, under state cadres	The Centre, wherever posted
Transfer, promotion and pay	Regulated by the state	Regulated by the Centre
Examples	IAS, IPS, Indian Forest Service	Indian Foreign Service, Indian Revenue Service, and others
Created by	Parliament under Article 312, through the Council of States	Ordinary executive or legislative action

State Services

Each state maintains its own civil, police, revenue, forest and specialist services, recruited by the State Public Service Commission. A proportion of posts in each All India Service is filled by promotion from the corresponding state service, which is the point at which the two systems meet and where most of the friction between them occurs.

Why the All India Services Exist

• National integration. A service recruited nationally, trained together and serving outside its members' home states creates a body with a national rather than a provincial outlook, which mattered acutely in a country assembling itself from provinces and princely states.
• Uniformity of administration across the country, so that standards, procedures and quality do not vary entirely between states.
• Efficiency, through competitive recruitment at a scale and quality no single state could sustain.
• Cooperative federalism, since officers move between the Union and the states and carry an understanding of both, which makes the two levels legible to each other.
• Continuity in crisis. During President's Rule the All India Services maintain the administration and thereby the unity of the country, which is the function most obviously requiring a service the Union can rely on.

The Federal Objection

The case against is that a state's senior administration is staffed by officers it did not recruit and cannot finally discipline, whose prospects beyond the state depend on the Union's empanelment, so that state control of its own administration is incomplete and an officer in conflict with a state government has somewhere else to look. Sardar Patel's defence in the Constituent Assembly rested squarely on integration: a service that holds the country together is worth the qualification it imposes on state autonomy.

The tension is not resolvable within the design, and it surfaces predictably whenever the Union and a state are governed by different parties, most visibly in disputes over the deputation of officers without the state's consent. The honest formulation is that the All India Services are a unitary device embedded in a federal constitution, deliberately, and that whether the benefit still justifies the cost is a genuine question rather than a settled one.

Recruitment

The Union Public Service Commission

The UPSC is a constitutional body whose independence rests on a structure that recurs throughout the Constitution: appointment by the executive, and insulation once appointed. Members hold office for a fixed term, may be removed only on the grounds and by the procedure the Constitution lays down, have their salaries and expenses charged on the Consolidated Fund of India so that the legislature cannot vote them into submission, and are barred from further employment under government, the chairman entirely and members except for specified higher appointments.

Its functions are to conduct examinations for appointment to the services of the Union; to assist states, if requested by two or more of them, in framing and operating schemes of joint recruitment; and to be consulted on methods of recruitment, on the principles of appointment, promotion and transfer, on disciplinary matters, and on claims for costs and pensions. Its advice on disciplinary matters is not binding, and the requirement that departures be reported to Parliament is the only sanction.

The State Public Service Commissions

The State Commissions hold the same constitutional position within the states, with members appointed by the Governor and removable only by the President, which is a deliberate protection against the state government that appoints them. Their record has been markedly worse than the Union Commission's: vacancies in the commissions themselves, long delays in completing recruitment, and recruitment scandals of a kind the UPSC has largely avoided. The difference is one of practice rather than of law, and the reason usually given is the weaker convention surrounding appointments to them.

The Examination and the Baswan Committee

Recruitment to the All India Services and the higher central services is through the Civil Services Examination, in three stages: a preliminary screening test, a written main examination, and a personality test. The structure derives from the Kothari Committee of 1976, which shaped the modern pattern.

The Baswan Committee, constituted in August 2015 and reporting to the UPSC on 9 August 2016, examined the eligibility, syllabus, scheme and pattern of the examination. Among its recommendations were reducing the upper age limit for general category candidates to twenty-six, and discontinuing the use of regional languages as a medium for writing the examination.

Both recommendations illustrate the genuine difficulty of examination reform. A lower age limit raises the service's average working life and reduces the years lost to repeated attempts, and it disadvantages candidates from backgrounds that take longer to reach the starting line, which is why the proposal has not been accepted. Restricting the medium would standardise assessment and would narrow access in a country where higher education is not uniformly available in English. Each proposal trades quality of intake against breadth of access, and the political system has consistently preferred access.

Standing Criticisms

• The examination tests the capacity to acquire and reproduce knowledge rather than the aptitudes administration requires, judgement under uncertainty, capacity to deal with people, and the ability to write clearly and decide quickly.
• The personality test carries substantial weight and limited reliability.
• The coaching industry that has grown around the examination advantages those who can pay for it, which qualifies the meritocracy the system claims.
• The long recruitment cycle leaves posts vacant and candidates in suspense for the better part of two years.
• There is no systematic effort to match the aptitudes revealed by the process to the services allotted, which are determined by rank and preference alone.

Training

Training is the only instrument available for adjusting a career service to changing tasks, because the workforce cannot be replaced. The Indian arrangement is unusually elaborate and unusually front-loaded.

The Structure

Training for the Indian Administrative Service runs for about two years and passes through five stages, combining classroom instruction with field experience.

• The Foundation Course at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, of about four months, taken jointly by recruits to all the All India Services and the central services. This is the most important feature of the design: officers who will spend their careers in different services acquire a common frame of reference and personal acquaintance at the outset, which is what makes coordination between services possible later.
• Phase I at the Academy, in which theoretical concepts, law, administration, revenue and management are imparted.
• Bharat Darshan, a structured study tour across the country.
• District training in the allotted state, where ground-level realities are learned and the officer holds his first independent charges.
• Phase II at the Academy, designed so that officer trainees returning from the districts share the experience gathered across the country, which converts individual field experience into a collective body of it.

The Argument About Duration

A committee that reviewed the syllabus recommended reducing the training period substantially, from about 103 weeks to around 75, on the ground that changes in the examination syllabus had created overlap with the Academy's teaching and that officers spent too long in attachments and too little in independent charge. The Academy resisted a reduction on that scale and proposed a smaller one.

The arguments for retaining the longer period are worth setting out because they generalise. The existing system has worked for six decades and produced capable officers, so it is not prudent to disturb it; the need is to change the content of training rather than its duration; and the training needs of the present generation of officers have changed, so the period should be used differently rather than shortened. That last point is the one that matters, and it is the same conclusion Mission Karmayogi reaches by defining capability through roles and competencies rather than through a syllabus.

The Institutional Framework

The Department of Personnel and Training, within the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, is the central agency responsible for policy formulation and coordination across the field of public personnel management, including training, administrative vigilance, staff welfare, machinery for joint consultation, arbitration, reservation and pension-related issues. It is the cadre-controlling authority for the Indian Administrative Service and the central secretariat services, gives the final interpretation of service rules where doubt arises, handles administrative matters relating to the Central Vigilance Commission, the Central Bureau of Investigation, the UPSC and the Central Administrative Tribunal, and oversees the functioning of the Academy and the training institutes.

Beyond the Academy, the system includes the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police Academy for the Indian Police Service, the Indira Gandhi National Forest Academy, the Foreign Service Institute, the national academies of the revenue and audit services, and the state administrative training institutes which train state services and conduct in-service courses.

Criticism

• Front-loading. The great bulk of training occurs before an officer has done the work, and in-service training thereafter is sporadic, poorly attended and not connected to advancement.
• No consequence. Where completion of training does not affect promotion, it is treated as an obligation discharged rather than a capability acquired, which is why the second ARC recommended linking promotion to the completion of training.
• Content. Training has been criticised for emphasising rules and procedure over the skills of management, negotiation, data and technology that modern administration requires.
• The specialist gap. An officer is trained as a general administrator and then spends a career in a succession of unrelated sectors, acquiring domain knowledge in none, which is the training system's contribution to the generalist problem.

Mission Karmayogi and the Capacity Building Commission

The National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building, Mission Karmayogi, was launched in September 2020 to create a competent civil service rooted in Indian ethos, with a shared understanding of India's priorities. It shifts training from rule-based to role-based, mapping each post to the roles, activities and competencies it requires and delivering continuous learning through the iGOT Karmayogi online platform. It is meant to reach officials of the Centre, the states and local bodies alike.

The Capacity Building Commission was constituted in April 2021, with Adil Zainulbhai as chairperson, as the custodian of the mission's framework. It sits in an institutional structure headed by a Public Human Resources Council chaired by the Prime Minister, with Karmayogi Bharat, a wholly government-owned special purpose vehicle, running the online platform. It was set up to bring a common, competency-based approach to training across ministries and training institutions that had each trained in their own way. Its mandate is to:

• facilitate the preparation of capacity building plans by ministries, departments, organisations and the states,
• exercise functional supervision over the training institutions involved in building the capacity of civil servants,
• make policy recommendations to the Department of Personnel and Training on personnel and capacity building,
• audit human resources in government and the outcomes of capacity building,
• approve knowledge partners and the mechanism for validating training content, and
• present an annual report to the Prime Minister's HR Council.

How far it has come. The Commission has moved training from a scatter of courses towards a common framework: ministries prepare capacity building plans, a competency model and standards for training institutions have been laid down, and online learning reaches officials, including those at the cutting edge, on a scale classroom training never did. Its limits are those of the mission. Completion of online modules is easier to count than change in performance, the link between learning and promotion or posting remains weak, and the Commission advises and supervises but does not control the personnel decisions that shape behaviour.

Supplement, not solution. The capacity constraint in Indian administration has several sources, and Mission Karmayogi reaches one of them, the competence of officials in post. It does not fill vacancies, especially at the cutting edge, correct the short tenures that prevent officers from applying what they learn, change promotion by seniority, or supply specialists where the generalist structure lacks them. A role-based framework in a system where postings are made for other reasons, and advancement does not depend on competence, will produce trained officials in the wrong posts. The mission is a necessary supplement, and it will relieve the capacity constraint only alongside reform of recruitment, tenure, appraisal and promotion.

Training and Capacity Building

Training and capacity building differ in scope and in object. Training is the planned development of an individual's knowledge, skills and attitudes for the performance of a defined job, delivered through courses at fixed points in a career. Capacity building is the wider and continuous process by which individuals, organisations and the institutional system as a whole acquire and keep the ability to perform their functions and reach their objectives. The United Nations Development Programme's work on capacity development distinguishes three levels: the individual, the organisation and the enabling environment of rules, incentives and institutions.

	Training	Capacity building
Unit	The individual employee	Individuals, organisations and the institutional setting
Object	Competence for a present or next job	The ability of the system to perform and adapt
Time	Episodic, at fixed points	Continuous
Means	Courses, instruction and attachments	Training plus systems, processes, technology, structures, incentives and culture
Measure of success	Skills acquired	Improvement in organisational performance and service delivery

An official who is well trained but works in a department with outdated processes, no data systems and no incentive to perform will not perform better, which is why training is a necessary part of capacity building but not the whole of it. Training must also follow the country's socio-economic and technological needs: a service that runs digital public infrastructure, regulates markets and manages climate risk needs content that changes with those tasks, not a syllabus fixed at entry.

The National Training Policy, 2012

The National Training Policy, 2012, which replaced the policy of 1996, set out the government's approach to training civil servants. Its main provisions were:

• Training for all, from the cutting edge level, where citizens meet the government, to the top, rather than for the higher services alone.
• Competency-based training, resting on a framework of the competencies each post requires and on training need analysis.
• A link between training and career progression, so that training carries consequence.
• Responsibility within each ministry and cadre, through training plans, designated training managers and funds set aside for training.

Read against the policy, the capacity problems that persist are largely failures of implementation: training below the higher services remained thin, need analysis was not done systematically, state training institutes were short of faculty and resources, and the link to promotion was not made. Mission Karmayogi, with its competency framework and online delivery, is in large part an attempt to carry out what the 2012 policy prescribed.

Representativeness

A civil service recruited purely on examination performance will reproduce the social distribution of educational advantage, and in India that distribution is deeply unequal. The question of whether and how the service should mirror the society it administers is therefore both a constitutional and an administrative one.

The Idea

J. Donald Kingsley developed the concept of representative bureaucracy in his analysis of the British civil service, and the proposition, as later stated with Samuel Krislov, is that broad social groups should have spokesmen and officeholders in administrative as well as political positions. Dwight Waldo identified representative bureaucracy, alongside client-oriented bureaucracy and people's participation, as one of the three perspectives the New Public Administration projected, holding that weaving them into public administration would democratise it further.

The argument has a passive and an active form. Passive representation is about composition: a service that looks like the society it serves is more legitimate in its eyes. Active representation is the stronger claim, that officers from a group will in fact advance that group's interests in administration. The first is easier to demonstrate and the second is what the objection to representative bureaucracy fastens on, since an official acting for a constituency is by definition not neutral.

The Indian Arrangement

• Article 16(4) permits the state to reserve appointments for any backward class of citizens not adequately represented in the services.
• Indra Sawhney held that the power under Article 16(4) applies to appointments and not to promotions.
• The 77th Amendment of 1995 inserted Article 16(4A), permitting reservation in matters of promotion for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes where the state is of the opinion that they are not adequately represented, which reversed that part of Indra Sawhney by constitutional amendment.

The sequence is instructive beyond its subject: a judicial limit on a legislative power was displaced by constitutional amendment, and the courts have since returned to the question repeatedly on the conditions that must be satisfied before the power is exercised. Reservation in the services is therefore one of the few areas where the balance between the judiciary and the legislature has been genuinely contested rather than settled.

The Administrative Argument

The case for representation in the service is that a bureaucracy drawn from a narrow social base will not understand the problems of those outside it, will be distrusted by them, and will in practice administer differently for people like itself. The case against is that it dilutes the merit principle, that it imports into the administration the social divisions it is supposed to hold itself above, and that it sits uneasily with neutrality.

The position most defensible in an answer is that the two objectives are not alternatives on the same axis. Merit determines whether an officer can do the work; representativeness determines whether the service as a body commands the confidence of those it administers. A service that is highly competent and visibly drawn from one section of society has an administrative problem as real as one that is representative and incompetent, and the reasonable object of policy is to widen the pool from which competent officers are drawn rather than to trade one value against the other.

Neutrality, Anonymity and Commitment

The relationship between the political and the permanent executive is the theoretical core of this topic, and a harmonious relationship between them is essential to effective administration. The civil servant's role is to advise the political executive impartially, and the doctrines of neutrality and anonymity exist to make that possible.

Neutrality

Neutrality means the impartial and non-political character of the civil service: civil servants remain non-political and serve different governments at different times impartially, performing their functions with efficiency, integrity, loyalty and proficiency. Mohit Bhattacharya describes it as a kind of political sterilisation, in which the bureaucracy remains unaffected by the changing flow of politics, giving technical advice to political masters while keeping aloof from the politics of the day.

The doctrine developed first in Britain, where it has become synonymous with the operation of the civil service. Earl Attlee called neutrality one of the strongest bulwarks of democracy. The Masterman Committee of 1949 gave it its formal statement, observing that impartiality had long been recognised as a special virtue of British administration, and warning that any weakening of the existing tradition of political impartiality would be the first step towards a political civil service, which would be contrary to the public interest and, in the long run, to the interest of the civil service itself. The concept spread to Canada, Australia, India, France and the United States, where the Hoover Commission of 1949 recommended its adoption.

Anonymity

Bureaucratic anonymity means that civil servants work from behind the curtain, without praise or blame. Its logic is reciprocal: the minister is answerable in Parliament and in public for the actions of the civil servants under him, and in return he protects them from parliamentary criticism. Anonymity and ministerial responsibility are therefore a single arrangement viewed from two sides, and neither survives the other's collapse.

The Limits of Anonymity

The norm operates only in respect of the legal and proper acts of civil servants. A minister must protect officials who implemented policy according to law; he does not assume responsibility for an official guilty of abuse of authority, which is treated as the official's personal act.

The Indian doctrine dates from the Mundhra case of 1957, in which public funds were invested improperly and the Chagla Commission, appointed to inquire into it, concluded that the Finance Minister should resign on the principle of ministerial responsibility. The episode established in India that the doctrine has teeth, and it remains the standard illustration, which is itself significant: a convention cited by reference to one instance from the 1950s has not been reinforced by many since.

The Committed Bureaucracy Debate

Against neutrality stands the argument for a committed bureaucracy, which arose in India in the late 1960s and has two quite different versions that an answer should distinguish.

• Commitment to constitutional values and to development goals. On this reading an administrator in a poor and unequal society cannot be indifferent between outcomes: he is committed to the Constitution's promises of equality and social justice, and a neutrality that treats land reform and its obstruction with equal detachment is a form of complicity. Development administration makes exactly this demand.
• Commitment to the government of the day and its programme, which is a different proposition entirely and shades into commitment to the party in office. This is the version the Masterman Committee warned against, and the version that produces a politicised service in which an officer's career depends on alignment.

The defensible position is that the first is compatible with neutrality and the second is not, and that the practical difficulty is the absence of any bright line between them, since a government's programme is normally presented as the implementation of constitutional values. The distinction that survives is procedural rather than substantive: an officer may be committed to the ends the Constitution sets, and must give the same honest advice whichever party is pursuing them.

Politicisation in Practice

The forms the problem takes in India are specific and worth naming: transfer and posting used as reward and punishment; the cultivation of officers by parties expecting to return to office; post-retirement appointments creating an interest in pleasing during service; and public identification of officers with particular policies, which destroys anonymity and makes neutrality unsustainable. The Supreme Court's direction that minimum tenures be fixed, and the creation of civil services boards to advise on postings, are the principal institutional answers, and both have been implemented unevenly.

T.S.R. Subramanian v. Union of India (2013)

The Supreme Court's ruling of 31 October 2013 in T.S.R. Subramanian v. Union of India is the principal judicial attempt to insulate civil servants from political pressure. It arose from a public interest petition by 83 retired civil servants, among them T.S.R. Subramanian, a former Cabinet Secretary, and drew on earlier reform proposals for fixed tenure and independent advice on postings. Its directions were these.

• Fixed minimum tenure. The Centre and the states were directed to provide an assured minimum tenure for civil servants, the Court reasoning that frequent transfers destroy professionalism and accountability and serve as an instrument of political control.
• Civil Services Boards. Boards of senior serving officers were to be constituted at the Centre and in the states, within three months, to advise on transfers, postings and disciplinary matters until Parliament legislated.
• Written orders. Civil servants should act on written instructions, and where they receive oral directions from political superiors, they should record them, so that responsibility for a decision can be fixed.
• A civil service law. The Court urged Parliament to enact a law under Article 309 regulating appointment, transfer and disciplinary action, in place of a system governed largely by executive rules.

In 2014 the Centre amended the cadre rules of the All India Services to provide a minimum tenure of two years and a Civil Services Board to recommend transfers. The rules still allow premature transfer for recorded reasons, and compliance in the states has been uneven, so the protection is weaker in practice than in the judgment.

Assessment. The ruling would help good governance because it targets the mechanism through which political pressure actually reaches officers, the transfer. A fixed tenure gives an officer time to master a post and to be held to account for results, protects the officer who refuses an improper demand, and, with written orders, makes the political executive answerable for its instructions. The objections are that tenure can also protect the inefficient or the corrupt, that elected governments have a legitimate claim to choose the officers who carry out their programme, and that a judicial direction cannot by itself change a political culture. The reform that would give it full effect is the one the Court asked for and Parliament has not enacted: a civil services law with a transparent transfer policy and boards whose advice is departed from only for recorded reasons.

The Service and Good Governance

Good governance has become the standard against which administration is judged internationally, and meeting it requires a change in the behaviour and skills of the services themselves. Several proposals have been advanced to that end, and they are worth knowing because they indicate the direction of institutional thinking.

A Central Authority for the All India Services

One proposal is a code of conduct for the All India Services enforced by a central regulatory authority with the features of a constitutional body rather than a departmental one: a multi-member body of a chairperson and between three and five members; appointment by the President on the recommendation of a high-level committee of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition in the House of the People and a judge of the Supreme Court; a tenure of five years or until the age of sixty-five; a requirement of twenty-five years' experience in public administration; status equivalent to the Chief Election Commissioner for the chairperson and to an Election Commissioner for members; and removal only by the President on grounds of proven misbehaviour or incapacity established by inquiry by a judge of the Supreme Court.

The design borrows deliberately from the Election Commission, and the borrowing identifies the problem it is meant to solve: postings, transfers and disciplinary decisions are currently taken by the executive that also has an interest in their outcome, and the only Indian institution that has successfully resisted comparable pressure is the one protected in this way.

Other Proposals

• Reconstituting the UPSC. One suggestion is to convert it into a Union Public Merit Promotion Commission, which would handle promotion, transfer and service conditions as well as recruitment, on the argument that an independent body deciding careers would bring transparency and accountability to the working of the bureaucracy.
• A vision for the services. Officers should work to a clear civil services code and a stated set of objectives oriented to the unity, integrity and sovereignty of the country.
• Reducing size. The strength of the Indian Administrative Service has grown from about 1,115 in 1951 to roughly 5,124 in 1991 and beyond 6,000 since, and the proposal is that redundant posts be eliminated and officers who do not perform be removed. The second half of that proposal runs directly into Article 311, which is why it is easier to state than to implement.
• Changing the mode of delivery, with officers working alongside citizens in the delivery of services rather than above them, which is the good governance agenda applied to the individual officer.

An Assessment of the All India Services

• Strengths. Their members are a reservoir of ability selected through a merit-based system; they are drawn from all classes, regions and castes, giving the service a genuinely national social base; and they work within a constitutional and legal framework rather than at the discretion of those in office.
• Weaknesses. Poor cadre management; tenure too short for accountability; advancement by seniority; appraisal that does not discriminate; and vulnerability to political pressure through transfer and posting.
• Opportunities. Competency-based capacity building, domain assignment, digital delivery, and the demand from an increasingly informed citizenry for measurable performance.
• Threats. Politicisation, the erosion of neutrality, the loss of able people to better-paid alternatives, and the risk that an administration which does not reform will simply be bypassed by bodies created outside it.

Generalist and Specialist

The Indian higher civil service is built on the generalist principle: an officer recruited without reference to a subject, trained in general administration, and posted across unrelated sectors through a career. The Fulton Committee in Britain declared the concept of a generalist administrative class obsolete, and the first Administrative Reforms Commission in India called for the gradual infusion of specialists to meet the technological challenge facing administration.

The defence of the generalist is that administration is itself a skill, that detachment from a technical viewpoint is what allows competing claims to be balanced, and that coordination requires someone whose loyalty is to the whole rather than to a profession. The case against is that modern administration is technical, that a secretary who moves every two years cannot understand the field he governs, and that subordinating specialists to generalists damages the morale of the specialist services.

The practical resolution is domain assignment, in which officers are attached to sectors for extended periods and build expertise within a generalist career, which is the direction both Mission Karmayogi's competency framework and the empanelment reforms point in. Whether it can be sustained against a posting system driven by political convenience is the open question.

Civil Services Reform

The Sequence of Committees

Indian civil service reform has been examined continuously: Gorwala in 1951 on integrity and speed; Appleby in 1953 and 1956 on organisation and method; Santhanam in 1964 on corruption; the first ARC from 1966 on specialists and on the Lokpal; the Kothari Committee in 1976 on recruitment; the Surinder Nath Committee and the Hota Committee in the 2000s on performance appraisal and on reform generally; the second ARC from 2005, whose tenth report dealt specifically with refurbishing personnel administration; and the Baswan Committee in 2016 on the examination.

What the Second ARC Recommended

• Regular in-service training, with promotion linked to its completion.
• Performance-based rather than seniority-based advancement, resting on a reformed appraisal system with disclosure and work targets.
• An ethics framework and a strengthened anti-corruption architecture.
• Fixed minimum tenures and a transparent mechanism for postings and transfers.
• Training conducted so that a disposition to work selflessly is developed, which the Commission raised in its report on unlocking human capital.
• Modernisation of the recruitment process, including the conduct of UPSC examinations online.

Lateral Entry

Lateral entry is the recruitment of specialists from outside the career service directly into senior posts. In June 2018 the Department of Personnel and Training invited applications for ten posts at Joint Secretary level, on a contract of three to five years, and the scheme was extended in 2019 to Joint Secretary and Director level appointments for accomplished professionals from outside government, on contracts of three years extendable to five.

The case for it. It brings domain expertise the career service does not possess, particularly in finance, technology, energy and trade; it introduces competition into a closed career structure and thereby some pressure on those within it; it widens the pool from which senior advice is drawn; and it addresses directly the generalist problem that every reform report since Fulton has identified.

The case against. It bypasses the constitutional recruitment machinery unless the UPSC conducts the selection, and the manner of selection determines whether the scheme is merit-based or patronage under another name. It risks importing the values of the sector an appointee comes from into decisions about regulating that sector. It damages the morale and the career prospects of a service that entered by open competition and finds senior posts filled from outside. Reservation does not apply to individual contractual appointments in the same way, which raises a question of representativeness. And an officer on a three-year contract has neither the security that makes independent advice possible nor the long horizon that public decisions require.

The balanced position is that lateral entry is a reasonable answer to a real problem and is not a substitute for reforming the career service. A handful of specialists at Joint Secretary level cannot change an administration of millions, and if the career service continues to promote by seniority, post by political convenience and train without consequence, lateral entry will supply a few good officers to a system that will absorb them without changing.

Assessment

The Indian civil service is an institution of considerable achievement and an obvious set of defects, and an answer should hold both. It has conducted elections in the world's largest democracy, held a diverse federation together, administered famine relief and disaster response, and maintained a standard of integrity at senior levels that many comparable states have not. Its recruitment remains genuinely open and competitive, which is not a small thing.

Its defects are the ones every commission has named for seventy years: advancement by seniority rather than performance, appraisal that does not discriminate, tenure too short for accountability, training without consequence, generalism in an age of technical government, and a posting system through which political pressure reaches the individual officer. The diagnosis has never been the difficulty. The difficulty is that each defect protects someone, and that the service asked to reform itself is the body whose position reform would alter.

Bureaucracy as an Impediment to Development

The critique that bureaucracy obstructs development has three sources, and an answer should keep them apart.

• Dysfunction from within. Robert Merton, in "Bureaucratic Structure and Personality" (1940), argued that the discipline needed for reliability leads officials to treat rules as ends in themselves, so that conformity displaces the goal the rule was meant to serve. He borrowed Veblen's term trained incapacity for the condition in which an official's training itself makes him unable to respond to changed circumstances. This is the root of the complaint that civil servants become so wedded to procedure that procedure becomes the work, and of the red tape that delays the decisions development needs.
• Imbalance with politics. Fred Riggs, in "Bureaucrats and Political Development: A Paradoxical View" (1963), argued that where bureaucracy grows faster than the political institutions that should control it, as in many new states, it comes to dominate them, and the growth of parties, legislatures and interest groups able to hold administration to account is stunted.
• Colonial inheritance. In India the apparatus was built for order and revenue, and its habits of control, centralisation and distance from the people survived into a state that asked it to promote change.

Bureaucratic and Democratic Values

Bureaucratic values	Democratic values
Hierarchy and command	Equality and participation
Expertise: the official knows best	Popular will: the citizen decides
Uniform rules applied impersonally	Responsiveness to particular needs
Secrecy and anonymity	Openness and public accountability
Continuity and stability	Change through elections

The collision is real but not constant. Development needs both sets of values: impartial rules and expertise to deliver programmes without favouritism, and participation and responsiveness to decide what the programmes should be and whether they work. The damage arises when bureaucratic values operate without democratic checks, as in the Community Development Programme of 1952, which the Balwant Rai Mehta Committee (1957) found had failed to enlist people's participation because it was run as a departmental programme.

Over-dependence. Indian planning relied on the bureaucracy not only to regulate but to produce, license and deliver, and the licence-permit system that resulted became a byword for delay and rent-seeking until the reforms of 1991 dismantled much of it. The dysfunction lay less in the bureaucracy itself than in asking a single hierarchical instrument to do everything.

The counter-argument. No state has developed without a capable bureaucracy. Peter Evans's Embedded Autonomy (1995) showed that the developmental states of East Asia rested on cohesive, merit-recruited bureaucracies with close ties to society. The Indian bureaucracy has conducted elections, delivered food security and disaster relief, and built the systems of identity and direct benefit transfer on which welfare now depends. The remedy for its rigidity is not to bypass it but to change its incentives and open it to the citizen: less discretion and procedure, the right to information, social audit, devolution to elected local bodies, and appraisal by results rather than by compliance with process.