Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar

The only way to place integrity above the threshold of temptation is to pay higher remuneration

The British achieved these twin aims by having a small cadre of civil servants with the best comparable service conditions in any alternative employment of similar status and responsibility.

B K Nehru, now ell into his eighties, was telling me the other day that as an ICS under-secretary, with less than a decade of service under his belt, he lived in a mansion on Thyagaraja Marg. Just getting past the gate up and the driveway would have deterred the most persistent bribe-giver. And who but the really desperate could have bribed a secretary to the British Government of India whose take-home pay of Rs 4,000 in 1946 gave him a purchasing power in white money which, at today's rates of inflation and taxes, would require a gross pay-packet before taxes of around Rs 400,000 per month?

The Pay Commission proposes to pay him Rs 26,000. That is what the rawest recruit could pick up in his first month of work at the neighbourhood multinational. Yet, the Pandian gift is 250 per cent higher then the present secretary's median pay of Rs 8,000. The British could afford it because there were no more than eight secretaries to the Government of India at Independence. Today, there are 92! We, therefore, pay peanuts -- and get monkeys.

The Pay Commission knows this, but can suggest little more than lubricating the machine because it is obliged to take as given the paternalistic administration of the ICS model -- even though, through modular expansion, we now have an administrative cadre some one hundred times larger than the one the British left us. The answer does not lie in restraining or even reversing the exponential rate of modular expansion, desirable as this would be in itself. The root answer lies in changing the module.

To change the module, we need first to make the IAS a secretariat service and exclude IAS officers from not only district and sub-district administrative posts but also non-administrative assignments in public sector management as well as sinecures and shift to contract employment for most specialisations. This will enable us to sharply reduce recruitment to the IAS and thus enable a hiking of basic IAS salaries to levels comparable with what similarly placed executives get in the private sector.

We should combine this with a decisive step towards computerised paperless record-keeping and file-processing to prune the size of the supporting staff. Larger employment goes with lower remuneration; the only way to place integrity above the threshold of temptation (at least for the normally honest person) is to pay higher per-capita remuneration. This, of course, we can afford to do only if the size of the cadre is sliced to the bare minimum. This module would then need to be replicated in the equivalent generalist state civil services.

A well-paid IAS/PCS officer would, of course, be a more difficult bull's eye for pecuniary targeting -- but s/he remains helplessly vulnerable to the worst threat in the politician's armoury, the threat of transfer. The transformation of the IAS into a secretariat service has the inestimable advantage of protecting the officer from the threat of disruption to his children's education and family life which, more than illegitimate financial bonuses, has emerged as the instrument of coercion in the politician-bureaucrat relationship.

T N Seshan, in his memoirs, tells the instructive tale of how three decades ago the only punishment his chief minister could inflict on him for not carrying out improper orders was his transfer from industry to agriculture. This involved no more disruption of his personal life than pressing a different button when he got into the lift in the morning.

And thus a messiah was born -- who might have been stillborn if, as in contemporary UP of Bihar or, indeed, contemporary Tamil Nadu, he found himself shuttled for his probity from Vellore to Tirunelveli, out to Bondinayakanallur and then to Vedaranyam -- all in a mere 12 months. We could institutionalise such protection from arbitrary transfer by making secretariat services of the central and state civil services.

Tell us what you think of this column