Principles for reform: Part - II

The current payment method to civil servants is dysfunctional, induces corruption and adversely affects productivity. All perks should be abolished, and salaries should be all in cash. Benefits should include no more than indexed, fair-valued pensions and healthcare.

The pension and healthcare benefits should be extended on modern lines. Both systems should be properly funded by contributions by officials and the government. The funds raised should be properly managed by professional money managers, and invested for later payouts. Benefits should be defined, and their proper use should be monitored.

Pensions should be portable and/or cashable at various stages of a career and not merely at the end of their career. This will allow careers to be better planned and not force people to hang on even when they have lost interest. Healthcare should be better detailed to define the liability of the fund and to let the user know the limits to which they will be helped. Audited procedures must be in place to prevent the abuse that is frequently reported. Also, government funding of care in foreign hospitals should be discontinued altogether.

Not all civil service jobs should be protected from external competition. The preferred scenario would be to open out recruitment to external competition. If that is not acceptable, all senior appointments (secretary and additional-secretary level) should be based on worldwide competition. Public-sector senior appointments affect so much; the best people should be sought for them.

The colonial system of the civil service that we have inherited is extremely centralising. Currently, the federal government controls all levels of government. After recruitment, a federal civil servant heads up local government from which he moves up to senior levels of the provincial service to eventually running federal departments. Following best practice, each level of government – federal, provincial and local – must be independent. Provinces and cities should have their own employees and there is no reason for them to be paid less or regarded as inferior to the federal government. This is a need for devolution. Any movement from one level to another should not be a transfer but a resignation and a new application.

The current rules of business designate the secretary as a Principal Accounting Officer (POA) of entire monoliths of government – divisions, ministries as well as attached departments. The result is excessive centralisation that impedes productivity. In the current system, governance is literally in the hands of five secretaries – the principal secretary, finance secretary, cabinet secretary, and finance and planning secretaries. Governance is built on decentralised mission-oriented agencies and departments with clear resources and accountability. There is no reason to give these secretaries so much power with hardly any accountability. Let each agency head and functional head be recognised as a POA and given adequate power and resources with very clear lines of accountability and audit rules to deliver public service.

Transfers should be recognised as a control device and should be discontinued. Frequent transfers are not helping productivity and should be questioned in parliament. Like the rest of the world, appointments should be given tenure with new appointments obtained through a competitive, not a command, process. Like in many parts of the world, each position is announced and competed for and each officer knows he can’t remain in a position for more than three years. If s/he can’t find a job within the system, s/he can look elsewhere. Mobility should be viewed as desirable. For that, mobility rules will be put in place not just within the civil service but also to facilitate a flow between the public and the private sector for required cross-fertilisation.

Processes and rules of business should be reviewed to ensure that there is a learning, investigating and thinking government that uses technology, developing data, information and analysis and innovation in policy determination and public-service delivery. Such a bureaucracy would be continuously reforming itself and adapting to a rapidly changing world.

In the past, the bureaucracy was a learning and researching bureaucracy. This is evidenced even now in the India Office in England where their famous district gazetteers and other reports are kept. We must make today’s bureaucracy a learning, thinking place again. There must be clear research departments in every ministry and agency, working on issues of policy preparation and reform and budget proposals. All departments must be held responsible for regular reports on various issues, from data to sector reviews to performance reports.

No meeting at any level must be held only using PowerPoint presentations. Policy notes or situation reports must be mandatory, and reports or minutes of such meetings must be made available unless there are top-secret items on the agenda.

The training programme of the government should be reviewed to facilitate a modern, professional bureaucracy. The current approach is about a century old and must be updated. Training academies are currently designed to park serving and retired officials, and participants consider it either a burden or a party. No serious training takes place.

Would it not be better to let Pakistani universities get some of this business? Let the civil service interact with them and also give them some business. This will also release valuable real estate that is being wasted in the name of training.

Office filing procedures must now be based on technology. The colonial filing system with hand-written illegible notes in the margins and those files with tie-strings must now go. As much as possible, filing and correspondence should be electronic. Similarly, use of video and email would eliminate a lot of useless meetings and so speed up work. Without a process for reform – a serious commission led by thought and intellect and public consultation – and the adoption of these principles, there will be no serious civil service reform.

The job of the commission should not be to meet over tea and samosas, but to write serious policy notes and white papers after several serious consultations across the country. And these papers and policy notes should be discussed in the cabinet and at other forums. A serious process of reform must begin with something like this to hammer out details. Some such list must be discussed point by point in retreats for days – and not perfunctorily in an hour of VIP interface.

Concluded

The writer is former deputy chairman of the Planning Commission.

Email: nhaque_imf@yahoo.com

Twitter: @nadeemhaque

Website: http://development20.blogs pot.com