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Indian civil service is dominated by intelligent generalist officers. While performance of their official function, they often face multiple ethical dilemmas.
Domain knowledge is important in resolving ethical dilemmas because:
- Civil servants with domain expertise are able to understand nuances and dynamics of particular field that helps in resolving clash between conflicting values. For example: E. Sreedharan, metro man of India, is a civil engineer by education.
- Government functions have evolved becoming more specialized and sophisticated, particularly with greater role of private players in service delivery. For example: properly framing government contracts are necessary for transparency and accountability.
- Domain expertise in civil servants helps in improving quality of decisions and service delivery, thus promoting public trust. For example: Dr. Rajendra Bharud, the collector of Nandurbar, was able to manage second wave of COVID-19 in an effective manner because of his domain knowledge.
- System of domain expertise also promote merit, efficiency, objectivity while reducing reliance on outside expert consultation.
Even in private sector, people in top management have domain expertise that help them resolve dilemmas. Tough important, domain expertise in not sufficient in all cases. Innovativeness and creativity are also required for resolving ethical dilemmas:
- Ability to find out of box solution that can help in reconciling seemingly diverging values/course of actions to resolve ethical dilemmas. For example: Giving benefit of government scheme to someone lacking required document (Solution- Use of ICT to provide provisional documents).
- Different experts may offer different suggestions/viewpoints for the same problem. A civil servant with creativity and innovation to identify right kind of data and advice for effective policy. For example: During Covid-19 management on questions of Lives vs Livelihood, different experts had varying opinions.
- It is also important for solving emerging inter-disciplinary problems while working under political, social and economic constraints. For example: problem of bad loan is rooted in economic slowdown, wilful defaults, politics-business nexus and inability of banks to assess risk.
So, both, domain expertise and creativity are important quality of a leader which enables him/her to resolve various ethical dilemmas.