Just three days after inviting applications for lateral entry to only 45 middle-level posts in the bureaucracy under 24 Central Ministries, the Government was forced to withdraw the notification and scrap the entire recruitment process, following objections raised by its coalition partners. The leader of the Opposition, Rahul Gandhi, accused the Modi government of undermining the Constitution by not allowing any reservation for these posts. The BJP also had its own electoral compulsions, given the impending elections in the crucial States of Haryana and Maharashtra in November.

Introduced in 2018 with only nine recruitments, lateral entry aimed at tapping the huge talent pool and expertise lying outside the government system. It followed the recommendation of the NITI Aayog and the Second Administrative Reforms Commission set up by the UPA government in 2005. The idea was to induct and utilise crucial domain expertise for better delivery, something clearly lacking at the decision-making level in the bureaucracy, over which the IAS has a stranglehold.

These career bureaucrats come with diverse backgrounds and are rotated among sundry departments throughout their career, which is not conducive to develop the kind of expertise needed in today’s extremely complex socio-economic environment. This leads to dysfunctional government programmes, poor delivery, waste of resources and unkept electoral promises. It was to address this gap that lateral entry was introduced on a contractual basis for a period of three years, extendable to five.

Appointments so far

So far, 63 appointments have been made through lateral entry, with 57 currently serving. One of them was R Ramanathan from TCS who led the Atal Innovation Mission. The Congress has also appointed numerous outside experts in senior positions in government — Manmohan Singh, MS Swaminathan, Nandan Nilekani being some shining examples. It had no problem with the scheme till now.

Reservation is a constitutional requirement implemented through a roaster system under which every 4th position in recruitment is reserved for an OBC candidate, every 7th position for an SC candidate, every 10th position for an EWS candidate and every 14th position for an ST candidate. Thus, legally there is no reservation requirement if no more than three candidates are recruited and since the lateral entries are advertised separately by different Ministries, this was used to bypass reservation. Indeed, the scheme was doomed from the beginning itself and attracted a muted response — you don’t attract the best talent on any contract job for 3-5 years. If the expertise, so sadly lacking in the existing mammoth government apparatus, is to be utilised for development, even the bureaucracy needs competition which can come only when it is open to private experts, something the IAS fears would be its nemesis.

Government can always avail of such expertise through consultants and advisers — there are plenty of them working even now — but to appoint them in crucial decision-making executive positions was perceived as a game-changer, which it certainly can be. But for that a level-playing field should be created by giving equal powers, responsibilities, authority and service conditions as are allowed to a career bureaucrat including permanence of tenure. Only then will the best talent come. But the entitlement mindset of the IAS officers wouldn’t accept this; they were unnerved and resentful when the scheme was launched.

While the world has moved towards a new public management system, adopting a new governance model and discarding traditional bureaucracy, we are still stuck with an archaic system of governance. In most developed countries, career bureaucrats at an operational level work with experts and specialists appointed at tactical and strategic levels. Their systems thus reflect greater democratisation and decentralisation, with widely dispersed decision-making authority.

A developed country believes in specialisation, while we still believe that in an increasingly complex world where specialised domain knowledge has become indispensable, subjects like agriculture, defence, revenue, finance, etc., can be effectively managed by generalist bureaucrats. Accountability has thus become barely visible, and delivery suboptimal. This archaic bureaucratic structure will make our goalpost of Viksit Bharat recede forever. 

The writer, a former DG of CAG, currently teaches at the Arun Jaitley National Institute of Financial Management