Civil service losing its sheen and luster

For the last few decades, civil service in Bangladesh has been deemed the preferred career choice for youths thanks to the discernible pay and concealed perks, social status and administrative powers and almost one hundred percent job security in the civil service. But in the recent years, with new avenues opening up in the western countries for both studies and jobs and also with lucrative jobs available in the local private enterprises, especially in IT and telecom industries, the first grade talents have gradually shied away from jobs in the public sectors leaving the vacancies in the government for only the lower grade talents to fill up.

Reports of shearing the bureaucrats of some of their judicial and executive powers, politicizing bureaucracy for meeting partisan interests, redefining the role and functions of field officers like those of Upazilla Nirbahi Officer (UNO) with diminished power making them abominably subservient to the local representatives and placing the civil bureaucrats in the warrant of precedence on par or below their counterparts who are dressed in police or military uniforms may now scare even the second grade talents away from the civil service.

And assaults on civil servants, like the recent battering on the district administration officials in Pabna, if allowed to go unabated, many observers are afraid, may be viewed in retrospect by the historians in the future as the last nails hammered on the coffin of public administration in Bangladesh leaving public offices to be staffed by only third grade mediocrities.

The public administration in Bangladesh seems to be ominously poised to slide into such a worse situation that youths of very low caliber may have to be appointed in civil services perhaps solely on political considerations and the civil bureaucrats may be made to remain committed more to serving the political party in power than to delivering service for the public welfare.

Civil services in Bangladesh are fast losing their sheens and lustrous qualities. The rich tradition of civil service of being nonpartisan seems to have been dead and buried and the institutional image of bureaucracy shattered, mainly due to undue political interventions in the affairs of public administration. The neutrality of Public Service Commission in conducting competitive exams for recruiting civil servants has also been questioned with the allegations of corruption and nepotism against some of the erstwhile members of the constitutional body. Hence, civil service is no more the first priority for the vast majority of talented young men and women who are eager to lead an honest but prestigious career.

The contribution of civil servants in terms of intellectual input for national development has declined substantially while the contribution of private entrepreneurs and nongovernment organizations in terms of real input for economic growth has risen dramatically.

The decline of the civil servants' contributions towards national development should not be blamed on the shoulders of politicians alone. The very colonial tradition and the unimpeded structure of civil service in Bangladesh are also greatly responsible for such a decline.

Groomed as typical bureaucrats and imbued with a stubborn attitude in rigid adherence to hackneyed rules that were framed by the British Raj ages back Bangladeshi civil servants at the higher echelons are yet to be resilient in their decision-making and utterly incapable of keeping pace with the speed of modern management. Their incapability to meet the current challenges in this age of information technology stares one in the face.

Our civil administration is still highly centralized and functions by remote controls from positions which are still far away from the reach of common people. The civil service which was designed to be neutral is being pressed in to the service of political masters and the use of administrative and police forces for settling political scores have become facts of life today.

The already politicized bureaucratic machinery cannot be distinguished by its efficiency, accountability or its spirit of service to the citizenry and their image of probity and integrity has also suffered badly. The neutrality, impartiality and integrity of the civil servants came under pressure as in the vast discretionary areas of authority of civil service the political masters started expecting collaboration and subservience in purely political objectives.

Still in our civil service there are problem-solvers available for undertaking challenging assignments in our administrative set-up, and there is a core of serious-minded honest officers who are capable of proving themselves in any job and given the opportunity they can still reverse the downward drift in the ethos of the civil services in Bangladesh.

The civil servants are supposed to deliver 'public goods', in the language of economists. Among the public goods are law and order, delivery of justice, education, medical care, making and maintaining roads and highways etc.

But there is a general public perception that had the responsibility of delivering public goods been withdrawn from the government and vested in private enterprises there would perhaps have been a win-win situation for both the government and the citizens.

Civil servants, as the saying goes, are neither civil nor servants and it is widely believed that they neglect their duties, ignore the people's needs, are self-serving, rude, and in most cases corrupt.

The problem with the civil service is in its very structure. We need more teachers, but we have more assistants. We need more research workers, but we have more peons. We need more nurses, but we have more typists. More than ninety per cent of government employees are what is called Class III and Class IV government servants. They are the "support" staff. They fetch and carry for the Class I and Class II officers. Except for pelf and prestige to the bosses these clerks and peons do not practically add any value to the work of bureaucracy.

Now is the time to revise the structure of the civil bureaucracy, abolish some categories of jobs, redefine each job, retrain existing personnel and ensure that each civil servant contributes value to the work of the government. What is more important is a need to re-invent the government and its machinery in consonance not with the doctrine of traditional bureaucracy inherited from the British colonial rule but with the modern science of administration.

Serious efforts need to be made to strike a balance between civil servants and politicians and to restrain the politicians from encroaching in areas of administrative functionality that legitimately falls within the sphere of responsibility of civil servants.

The efficiency and effectiveness in delivery of services and redressing the grievances of people should be the weapons placed solely in the hands of a civil servant to disarm politicians who try to ride roughshod over the norms and rules of administration. The other effective instrument to dissuade political intervention is free access to information and transparency in decision-making. Delivery of service to the citizens can improve and political intervention checked if information at various points can instantly be made available to the citizens. The use of computer in as many fields of administration as possible is an effective instrumentality that can help day-to-day public affairs make transparent and reduce arbitrary demands of politicians on the administration.

The civil administration should be thoroughly depoliticized and made responsive to the public and responsible only to the rule of law. Our politicians should also realize that intervening with the bureaucracy will boomerang on them when their party in power will have to sit on the opposition benches in the parliament.

If the bureaucracy cannot be ridden of its structural burdens and has to dance in accordance with the whims of the party in power it is rather better that the civil service in Bangladesh is abolished altogether and the responsibility of delivering public goods vested on private enterprises so that our future generations are not left with a legacy of inefficient and corrupt governance.

Writer can be reached at: maswood @ hotmail.com

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Civil service losing its sheen and luster

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