Daily Times

Reforms of Pakistan’s civil service resemble my ‘reform’ of the words Sivil and Cervice in the title so that they are only spelled differently but give out the same sound and perform pretty much the same function as ‘civil’ and ‘service’. The work that the bureaucracy essentially does, the structure under which it delivers its services and the compensation it receives from the state have hardly been subjected to any substantial reform.

Superficial changes adopted by the government/s have remained unsuccessful in disturbing the status quo functioning of the service that has hitherto failed to become a critical support vehicle of the state. And if the ongoing reform is also restricted to the mere renaming of the service groups or to a revision of the education criteria for joining the service, one should not then expect it to start performing at the desired optimal efficiency level following the reform as has happened in the aftermath of each reform iteration of the past.

If one reads into the history of Pakistan’s civil service reforms, it appears that they have been designed unimaginatively. One can also find a certain sense of lack of diversity such that all reforms applied in the past can comfortably be placed into three equally unyielding categories. Interestingly, when one category failed, the government applied another to vacillate aimlessly between the three categories. This is a classic case of regression of the civil service that has tried once too many to break the shackles and move beyond the structures and practices of the British bureaucracy that the colonial power established to extend and fortify its reign over the subcontinent. Clearly, it did not do so to serve the people that is the object of all well-functioning civil service systems prevalent around the contemporary western democracies.

Anyhow, rewinding to the three categories of reforms, the first is what I call a semantic reform. This is where reform went only as far ahead as to propose nomenclatural adjustments to the service groups effecting that the public derived a different meaning out of what each service group was supposed/mandated to do but the work that they did and the structures under which they performed such work remained more or less the same. The district management group for instance, considered once the linchpin of the service and one that has flourished to allow itself an expansive role in the functioning of the bureaucracy, was renamed Pakistan Administrative Service some time ago. The assumed productivity of the service, the jobs that its officers performed or the results it was expected to achieve remained largely unchanged. The name-change meant that the challenges that its officers faced in securing federal and provincial postings were not there anymore given that the word ‘district’ that defined its primary jurisdiction was removed from its name.

If one reads into the history of Pakistan’s civil service reforms, it appears that they have been designed unimaginatively. One can also find a certain sense of lack of diversity such that all reforms applied in the past can comfortably be placed into three equally unyielding categories

The second category is of a political reform that shifted the power balance between state institutions, notably the bureaucracy, the political elite (parliament) and the military, through the adoption of certain legal and regulatory instruments that allowed one institution or a group of institutions greater authority over the other/s. An instrument used frequently is the local government ordinance (LGO). The LGOs have regularly been used as a tool to contain the bureaucracy and set limits to the powers and authority it wields over the civil administrative process.

The 2001 LGO weakened the bureaucracy by empowering the district nazims (elected mayors) against the deputy commissioners (DCs). In fact, it went on to abolish the office of the DC to replace it with the toothless office of the district coordination officer (DCO) that was supposed to act under the command of the district nazim. Magistracy powers of the DC were also withdrawn which could not be completely returned even after the passing of the local government ordinance of 2013 that, ironically, sought to restore powers of the bureaucracy to improve local governance and decision-making that had suffered quite badly at the hands of the inexperienced local political representatives.

The third is a recruitment reform, where only the hiring criterion of the human resource was changed to attract a different maybe more relevant and efficient set of skills and expertise in the service. This is a good place to start the institutional reform process however, unless the systemic, financial and structural adjustments are made (complimentary yet necessary changes), better human resource governance would only account for a starter. And going by the rumors emerging out of the institutional reforms task force, one can see that recruitment is where the ongoing reform is expected to start. It is likely that a specific degree major might be set up as a criterion to sit the qualifying examination for each service group. A law or criminology graduate will only be allowed to sit the Police service entrance examination while a public policy or administration graduate would be allowed to sit the Pakistan administrative service examination. While this would add some level of specialization and division of labour to the service, it would rid it off the essential diversity in the human resource that the service otherwise attracts.

The writer is an economist and former director of the Burki Institute of Public Policy (BIPP)