For civil services, HR lessons from the military

Source– The post is based on the article “For civil services, HR lessons from the military” published in “The Indian Express” on 20th April 2023.

Syllabus: GS2- Role of civil services in a democracy

Relevance– Reforma in civil services

News– The article explains the need for adopting HR practices from the military to reform civil services.

What are the national goals and strategy of India?

There are no poor people, only people in poor places. The war on poverty is won by raising the productivity of five physical places — states, cities, sectors, firms, and skills.

The strategy is to replace high employed poverty with high-paying jobs through urbanisation, formalisation, industrialisation, financialisation and human capital.

What are the HR practices in armed forces that should be adopted by civil services?

Tenure: The Agniveer revamp will reduce an average soldier’s age, ensure motivation for continuing in service, and gradually raise military capital expenditure.

This allows organisations to renew themselves without complications, court cases or a huge pool of promotable but not postable.

The government must hire all new civil servants for a fixed 10-year tenure. The rollover percentages should be decided by a hard-coded organisational structure.

Specialisation: In a democracy’s generalists are politicians. Civil servants are technocrats whose mandate is assisting in governance.

The ideal administrator is not the gifted layman who frequently moves from job to job within service and can take a practical view of any problem.

Young military recruits pick an area of expertise early. Our civil services must replicate this.

Structure: The “on-paper” performance management systems in civil services have collapsed. Only a few civil servants don’t get to the top positions through indiscriminate promotions.

Top heaviness also undermines organisational effectiveness. The pyramid has become a cylinder.

Uttar Pradesh has roughly 80 DGs and additional DGs for around 2.5 lakh policemen, while the army has about 175 lieutenant generals for about 12 lakh soldiers. Organisational structures should be the Eiffel Towers because more work doesn’t mean more bosses.

The best solution for differentiation in civil services is honest appraisals. So organisational structure should be changed to restrict the secretary rank population in New Delhi to 25, chief secretary/DG rank in states to two.

There is a need to introduce differential retirement ages based on rank and shrink the number of ministries and departments.