Daily Times

Civil servants are not expected to perform specialized and technical jobs. Their forte is skills like administration, diversity, teamwork, public speaking and the ability to establish and maintain profitable business relationships, etc. Holding a separate examination for each service group that a graduate of any degree program, regardless of what specialization, can sit is different from having a certain degree specialization as an eligibility to sit the examination. The latter means forsaking many skills to add a certain level of technical expertise and specialization to the service.

The current reform is in full swing and much is expected out of the Dr. Ishrat led reforms task force but resultantly, if the reform ideas that emerge out of the deliberations of the task force is derived from, based upon or is a look-alike of any of the aforementioned three categories of reform, it would allow one the opportunity to say that the government hasn’t done its work.

Prudently, the task force must begin must begin from a need analysis to determine why such reform of the upper echelon of the civil service is needed in the first place. Any reform process that begins without the establishment of the need to undertake such reform would become a basis for ill-conceived and misdirected reform ideas having much semblance to what we’ve produced in the past.

Any reform process that begins without the establishment of the need to undertake such reform would become a basis for ill-conceived and misdirected reform ideas having much semblance to what we’ve produced in the past

So,what is particularly wrong with the civil service that demands reform? This is a question that will invite several observations but I tell you, none very convincing. Not because the structural problems of the service that the reform may inevitably set out to fix do not exist but because there lies no evidence for them to exist. One observation is the low productivity of the civil servants. But do we have productivity numbers for what civil servants produce in an hour of work, or what they achieve provided a certain financial endowment. Since no statistical arm of the government, in the centre or in the provinces produces such data, observations on civil servants being slackers and not doing their work could be inaccurate and unfounded. But they could also be true in which case, reform must be applied with a focus on enhancing productivity and no other ends.

Similarly, certain groupsor departments within the service may be doing well enough to not deserve any reform applied to their structure, functioning or operations. And thus a uniform set of reform adjustments applied to all service groups would be a generalization that shall result in counterproductive actions being taken by the reforms task force.

The reason why this is important is what if the data reveals that civil servants are low on productivity, some slack and don’t do their work. Some others wish to contribute but their motivation to do so is low given the lack of monetary and non-monetary incentives. But what if their productivity is still much higher than productivity levels in some of the other institutions. Then should the institutional reform process begin from reforming the civilservicefirst or should the reform of other institutions predate the reform of the civil service. And if the civilserviceshould require reform before some other institutions, what is the reform going to look like?

Some of these concerns have been addressed in the works of Dr. Ishrat who’s done a commendable job in setting the record right. He tells us clearly what’s wrong in the service, why are civil servants not performing and he writes with some certainty that they aren’t, however much of this is based on inferences, presumptions and the common impression of the service and not on data or other forms of evidence like the numbers on productivity, efficient resource usage, skill levels and competence, etc. Conclusively, if his reform however, goes any further from the set of reforms envisionedby himself during the Musharraf era, Pakistan’s civil servants may expect to do a lot of new things in surprisingly new ways.

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