Not all babus retire: Four are back to help govt select its top rung

Insiders once, they will again have a say in the selection of the top rung of the country’s bureaucracy. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ...

Insiders once, they will again have a say in the selection of the top rung of the country’s bureaucracy.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last week gave the green signal to involve retired bureaucrats in the process of empanelment of all Joint Secretaries and Additional Secretaries.

The retired bureaucrats who are likely to be drafted for this job are former Ambassador to US Abid Hussain, former Civil Aviation Secretary A H Jung, former Disinvestment Commission chairman G V Ramakrishna and former Kerala Chief Secretary V Ramachandran.

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The Prime Minister, it is learnt, cleared the names of the former administrators last week.

The idea is to let the panels provide additional inputs to the empanelment committees, setting in motion one of the first radical moves to usher in administrative reforms. Two separate panels, of two retired officials each, are to be formed and are expected to start functioning shortly. While one panel will scrutinise Annual Confidential Reports (ACRs) of Joint Secretary level officers, the other will look at the reports of Additional Secretary level officers.

Although the original proposal was to involve a rank outsider, probably someone from the IIMs, in the ACR scrutiny panel, the Government finally decided to go for only former administrators.

The format and composition of the scrutiny panel was decided after a series of lengthy discussions between top officials of the PMO, the Cabinet Secretariat and the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT). The former administrators are expected to function from the Cabinet Secretariat and will hold periodic meetings to pore over the files.

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Meanwhile, the Government is writing to state governments to ensure that the system of writing ACRs is done in a systematic and time-bound manner. The DoPT is also busy in another process: henceforth, it will ensure that qualifications of senior bureaucrats match with their on-the-job experience and areas of specialisation.

Ritu Sarin

Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption. Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More