It’s taken India’s public services 57 years to create what looks distinctly like a corporate HR department. The Public Services Bill 2006 is a commendable effort to extricate its honest officers from the unholy nexus of corrupt politicians and their own corrupt colleagues. The Central Public Services Authority (CPSA) as the nodal agency will be responsible for regulating the framework, that will also ‘promote principles underlying the Constitution and provide honest, impartial and frank advice to the political executive’. It will take initiatives to ensure accountable and transparent practices, be the forum for whistleblowers and officers being intimidated, confer with the government on welfare schemes for India’s babus, devise policies for career advancement based on merit and open competition and ensure that public servants are allowed to do their job honestly, without political interference.
For the average citizen it would be an insight of sorts to know that these values aren’t yet engraved in black and white in the civil services’ psyche, even if we haven’t seen them in practice. The citizenry, at the receiving end of bureaucracy’s high-handedness, venality and apathy, has always held a dim view of the protection that our bureaucrats enjoy against prosecution for criminal acts. Years of neglect and clearly, absence of guidelines, has led to the virtual collapse of public services in parts of the country.
Scepticism that babu culture will always work in self-interest is doing a disservice to the many officers who have done their best against the tide of weak governance. For every Gautam Goswami, indicted for a multi-crore flood relief scam, there will be an S.R. Rao, who brought plague-hit Surat back on the tracks, or a Krishan Kumar in Punjab’s Khothran, who harnessed community power to correct the skewed gender ratio in a cluster of villages. It is to empower the latter and give these officers the benefits of healthy governance that the bill should be welcomed. Also, there should be place somewhere for a contract ensuring that an empowered bureaucracy delivers on its mission to serve citizens.