Reservation or not, lateral entry in bureaucracy a flawed approach

CHENNAI: In 1972, Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan introduced lateral entry to senior posts from the level of Deputy Secretary to Secretary in the Central Secretariat and for comparable positions in Pakistan’s Foreign Service. This was done based on the recommendations of an Administrative Reforms Commission.

Bhutto blamed the generalist Civil Service of Pakistan (CSP), successor to the Indian Civil Service (ICS), for many of the country’s ills. He claimed that lateral entry would bring in fresh talent and specialist knowledge. In reality, it was a ploy to undermine the elite CSP by appointing party loyalists as bureaucrats.

The lateral entrants were inducted through only an interview, bypassing the traditional competitive examination. A politically well-connected person with limited chances for career advancement in his parental cadre or organisation could move to the Federal Government as a lateral entrant and rise faster and higher. There was only a loose correlation between the lateral entrant’s previous work experience and his new role.

Lateral entry, once introduced, tends to die hard. General Zia-ul-Haq abolished Bhutto’s system but institutionalised military officers' entry into civilian bureaucracy by reserving 10 per cent of posts for them. Benazir Bhutto opened a 'placement bureau' in the Prime Minister’s office and appointed her party loyalists to key civilian posts. General Pervez Musharraf escalated the induction of military officers into civilian bureaucracy to unprecedented levels.

The frequent misuse of lateral entry eroded the neutrality, competence and esprit de corps of Pakistan’s civil services, making it difficult to attract and retain top talent. In an article in 'Dawn' titled 'Copying Neighbours' (June 14, 2018), Pakistani scholar FS Aijazuddin warned India against the dangers of the lateral entry system. He wrote: "Those Indians who forget Pakistan's history are condemned to relive it."

Merit system in India is 166 years old

Pakistan’s lateral entry system was a euphemism for the spoils system – a practice in which a winning political party appoints its supporters to various civil posts in the government – as opposed to the merit system in which appointments are made to a permanent civil service through a competitive examination conducted by an independent body without regard to the political views of the appointees.

The spoils system takes its name from an 1832 speech by the United States senator William L Marcy who defended the practice with the remark: "To the victor belong the spoils of the enemy". On Presidential Inauguration days and for several months thereafter, mobs of job seekers used to storm the White House and this was a regular feature of the US political landscape during the 19th century. The US woke up to its danger only when a disgruntled job seeker assassinated President James A Garfield in 1881 for his alleged ingratitude. The assassination triggered the passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Act, 1883, which replaced the spoils system with the merit system and a career bureaucracy.

In India, the merit system was introduced by the British in 1858 – 12 years before it was adopted in the UK and 25 years before it was adopted in the US. The Indian Civil Service (ICS) was considered one of the finest public services in the world and the ‘steel frame’ of British India.

India continued with the merit system after Independence and the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) has done a commendable job over the years by insulating recruitments from political patronage and selecting the best and the brightest in the country. It conducts the Combined Civil Services Examination – one of the toughest exams of its kind in the world – for the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Indian Foreign Service (IFS), Indian Police Service (IPS) and about 20 other Services every year. In the 2023 examination, only 1,016 candidates were finally selected out of about 13 lakh applicants.

No less a person than Professor Lant Pritchett of Harvard University paid this handsome compliment in 2010: “The IAS is full of officers who have passed an entrance examination and selection process that makes getting into Harvard look like a walk in the park. I have worked for the World Bank and it employs really brilliant people. I think the Indian elite and many Indian government officials in the IAS are even better than the World Bank brains.” Lant Pritchett’s praise is equally applicable to the members of the other Services recruited through the UPSC.

Why then is Indian bureaucracy generally perceived as inefficient, unresponsive and uninterested in public welfare? Why do government programmes fail to deliver the promised results and government projects have huge cost and time overruns?

The problems of India’s civil services are not with recruitment; they are with what happens after an officer joins the system. Even the best and the brightest can lose their bearings in a system where the criminalisation of politics, excessive political interference, rampant corruption, and frequent, arbitrary and punitive transfers have become the order of the day; and in which “corrupt bureaucrats are despised but thrive; the honest are respected but do not rise; and idealists end up nowhere” as a US think tank once put it. If the best and the brightest in the country are unable to function effectively in such a political milieu, there is no reason to believe that lateral entrants from the private sector or elsewhere can do any better.

Government-private sector comparisons are inapt

The government operates under severe constraints that the private sector does not. As the government is a very large organisation, it must have detailed rules for the conduct of its business. As the government administers public money, it must account for every rupee. As the government wields enormous authority, it must have many checks and balances. As the government is the provider of last resort, it must do a lot of things that the private sector either can’t or won’t do. As the government’s objectives are often intangible, performance evaluation is difficult and process compliance becomes more important than the achievement of outcomes. As the government has to satisfy all classes of citizens, it cannot concentrate resources on a small number of priorities the way businesses do. As political leaders want to win elections at any cost, they often make suboptimal or even bad decisions. It follows that the government can never have the nimble efficiency of the best of the private sector which are not hampered by these fetters.

The US is often cited as a shining example of the ‘lateral entry of private sector executives into higher bureaucracy’, but this is a misconception. In a seminal essay, Managing the Public Service Institution (1973), Peter F Drucker noted: “There is no reason to believe that business managers, put in control of public service institutions, would do better than the bureaucrats. Indeed, we know that they immediately become bureaucrats themselves.”

Drucker cited the examples of a large number of business executives who had performed very well in their own companies and had moved into government positions during World War II. But in government they found themselves bogged down by procedures and red tape - and deeply frustrated by the experience. A more recent example is Rex Tillerson who was a successful Chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil for 11 long years but an abject failure as US Secretary of State and was fired by President Donald Trump in March 2018 after a stint of just 13 months.

Even where a handful of business executives made a successful transition from business to government, none achieved the kind of striking success that they had shown in the private sector. The same holds good for lateral entrants from academia, research institutions and international organisations.

A recruitment process that does not inspire confidence

Unmindful of the lessons of history, India has been experimenting with lateral entry to the posts of Joint Secretary, Director and Deputy Secretary in the Central Secretariat since 2018-19. The stated objectives were to “bring expertise and domain-specific knowledge into the system” and “align the bureaucracy with the market forces”. The recruitments were made based only on the candidate's résumé and interview, and without implementing reservations for the Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST) and the Other Backward Classes (OBC). Barring Central government employees, all individuals fulfilling the prescribed age, educational and work experience qualifications were eligible to apply. The period of contract/deputation was three years extendable up to a maximum of five years. Sixty-three lateral recruitments have been made so far. Of these, 57 appointees are still serving in their respective Central ministries and 35 are from the private sector.

The claim that lateral entrants bring in domain-specific expertise is overstated. First, much of the required technical expertise is already available with the Government of India (GOI) – with the heads of departments, research institutes and universities, expert boards and commissions, among others. Where necessary, advisors and consultants are often hired. There are also innumerable studies and reports done by reputed national and international agencies. It is difficult to visualise what 'extra expertise' a mid-level lateral entrant to the Union ministry will bring to the table. Second, a specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less. Any specialised discipline has numerous branches, and each branch has many sub-branches. Therefore, to get a holistic view of a specialised discipline such as, say, semiconductors and electronics, it is necessary to consult with not just one expert, however eminent he may be, but dozens of them.

When the stated goal is to bring in specialist knowledge, a tough recruitment test (at the very least a multiple-choice questions test plus an essay) in the specific area of domain expertise followed by an interview is an absolute imperative. Without a rigorous recruitment test, shortlisting a few candidates for the interview will neither be easy nor correct.

Recruitments based solely on résumés and interviews, even when done by the UPSC, will open the door to political manipulation, nepotism, and cronyism in due course, similar to what transpired in Pakistan.

Officers from the IAS and the other Services pass one of the toughest exams in the world and undergo continuous evaluation of performance, potential and integrity for at least 9 years, 12 years and 16 years before they become deputy secretary, director or joint secretary in the Central Secretariat. But lateral entrants can walk in based only on résumé and interview and with their performance, potential and integrity untested.

The minimum work experience prescribed for them is only 7 years, 10 years and 15 years for the deputy secretary, director and joint secretary level posts. This is unfair and has demoralised career civil servants.

In the past, several eminent technocrats such as V Krishnamurthy, Mantosh Sondhi, DV Kapur, MA Wadud Khan, and RV Shahi; the well-known plant scientist MS Swaminathan; and renowned economists such as Manmohan Singh, IG Patel, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Rakesh Mohan, and Vijay Kelkar had served as secretaries to GOI through lateral entry. A recruitment test can be dispensed with only for lateral recruitments to secretary-level posts because, with 30 years of experience or more, assessing the domain expertise and eminence of the candidates is easier; their records usually speak for themselves. But at the level of joint secretary or below, most candidates are still 'works-in-progress' and there are not likely to be any standout performers.

At the level of secretary, the lateral entrant may have the stature to significantly influence policy-making but at the level of joint secretary or below, his influence will be rather limited; he will be just another file pusher and probably a worse one. Moreover, at the level of secretary, if the lateral entrant is inefficient or out of his depth, he will stand glaringly exposed and this acts as a built-in check against appointing a crony or a party loyalist as secretary, but at the level of joint secretary or below, the crony or party loyalist may well carry on as a 'passenger'.

Therefore, lateral entry into senior bureaucracy should be only at the level of secretary where warranted, and not at the level of joint secretary or below. Lateral entry should be the rare exception and not the rule.

The question of reservations

On August 17, 2024, the UPSC came out with a fresh advertisement for filling 10 posts of joint secretary, and 35 posts of director/deputy secretary across 24 Central ministries through lateral entry. As in the previous instances, this advertisement also did not earmark any posts for OBC, SC, ST candidates. It led to a political backlash from the Opposition parties and two of the BJP’s allies. On August 20, 2024, Jitendra Singh, Minister of State for Personnel, wrote to the chairperson of the UPSC asking for the withdrawal of the advertisement.

His letter stated that “in the context of the Hon'ble Prime Minister's focus on ensuring social justice”, the applicability of reservations to posts filled laterally “needs to be reviewed and reformed”.

The Department of Personnel and Training (DOPT)’s "Brochure on Reservations" mandates reservations even for temporary appointments of more than 45 days' duration. But reservations do not apply to standalone posts or what is called “single post cadres”.

In 2018-19, when the UPSC first advertised 10 joint secretary posts for lateral entry – one for each department – it treated them as subject-specific, single-post cadres, and did not apply reservations. But this time, as many as eight posts of deputy secretary/director were advertised for the Department of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare alone, and yet, reservations were not applied.

What is key here is how the term 'subject' is defined – it can be defined very broadly to refer to an entire ministry, or less broadly to refer to a department within a ministry, or very narrowly to refer to a specific post in a department. Adopting the very narrow definition of 'subject', the UPSC has converted non-standalone posts to standalone posts, treated each of the 63 posts already filled through the lateral entry and the 45 posts now advertised as subject-specific, single post cadre, and sidestepped reservations. This makes a mockery of the term 'cadre'. Since every post in government has a specific job description, it is theoretically possible to treat all government posts as “single post cadres” and circumvent reservations. In my opinion, it would be appropriate to treat a department as the ‘unit’ and apply reservations to all posts at a given level earmarked for lateral entry.

Concluding remarks

In sum, there is a glaring mismatch between GOI’s stated aims and the manner in which it is going about the lateral recruitment process.

Selections based only on résumés and interviews are likely to degenerate into a spoils system over time. The mere implementation of reservations will not cure the defects of lateral entry as its political critics seem to assume. With or without reservations, lateral entry is a bad idea (except in rare instances as discussed earlier) that should be jettisoned. The government should stop tinkering around with the merit system that has served India well for 166 years.

(The author is a retired IAS officer of Tamil Nadu cadre and a former Vice Chancellor of the Indian Maritime University)