Still at the public's service

The Service of the State: The IAS Reconsidered
By Bhaskar Ghose
Published by Penguin Books, 2011
Available in India, 499 rupees
Reviewed by Jitendra Nath Misra

The Indian Administrative Service (IAS) has been praised for its service to the nation, but also criticised for being slow. Bhaskar Ghose, a distinguished former member of the IAS, argues that, despite its faults, the agency can still be trusted as a force for good.
Its members, he says, continue to operate on mutual trust and bonding, where seniors protect juniors, where moral concern still is a beacon, and where common sense and calm provide the reassuring hand of authority.
Ghose is not one to inscribe his own paean. He acknowledges the venality of a minority of IAS officers, who pursue career goals above all else, whatever the cost. But the best, Ghose’s “regular officers”, are guided by “a sense of innocence, of transparency”, the likes of Ivan Surita, Ranjit Gupta and JC Talukdar, who mentored and protected young officers. The best in the IAS gave not sermons, but examples, he asserts.
Ghose dwells on aspects of governance. His early training did not prepare him as a judicial officer, and he once passed a guilty verdict on an issue he knew nothing about. Similarly, block-development officers (a “block” is part of a district) were trained to merely disburse funds, not to spend them.
On another note, Ghose is scathing about the financial adviser who can kill a project by denying it funds. There are positives too: inspections of the lower administration by senior officers do good.
When he received orders to work in 24 Parganas district in West Bengal state, Ghose writes, “apprehension hovered in the periphery of my world, like a dark shadow”.
But district life was not all that bad, as he discovered. When he moved to Delhi, Ghose missed the warmth of relationships in districts and state capitals. In his film “Bhuvan Shome”, Mrinal Sen poetically portrays the humanisation of a civil servant by a village girl.
Ghose says IAS officers changed from persons who persuaded ministers to a point of view, to ones who “advised and consented”. India’s new leaders initially turned to civil servants for decisions, but when the sense of their own power sunk in after rounds of elections, the politicians realised that they, not civil servants, were the masters.
Readers might wish that Ghose had engaged more on the issue of power, and the corruption it breeds.
As Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Ghose deftly navigated a slur against the Archaeological Survey of India’s restoration work on Cambodia’s Angkor Wat. He took the French criticism of the Indians’ work to Unesco, which, along with the Cambodian government, supported India. Ghose reveals that it was the French who had restored pieces in the gallery depicting the Ramayana in the wrong order, which the Indians corrected.
Ghose champions the Indian policy of placing an age limit on recruitment to the civil service, reasoning that older recruits lose motivation and idealism, but is silent on the policy of affirmative action in recruitment, which has helped India’s underprivileged join the higher civil services.
To maintain its niche in a society where many talented persons move to the private sector, the IAS has to evolve. India’s economic growth and the uneven distribution of its fruits have raised new moral and political questions, and the resulting imbalance in Indian society will test the mettle of its civil servants.
How will the officers cope with the new challenges? Does training in horseback riding or climbing mountains help them develop the ability to command and control, as Ghose asserts?
We cannot blame Ghose for writing from a sense of entitlement, because he is the product of what still remains a meritocracy. The IAS not only saw the nation through the violence of Partition, but also continues to attract recruits who dream of an India that can better serve its citizens, and manage its ascension into the ranks of major economic powers.
But how will the elite create better governance, and restore, what novelist Tarun J Tejpal calls “the broken covenant” of the republic’s founding fathers, by putting their privilege at the nation’s service?
If history is any guide, the IAS will endure, perhaps in a new avatar. As a service it had antecedents going back to the Mauryas, who unified India in the third century, and the Mughals, who created the meritocratic Mansabdari system in the 16th century.
Even if these early efforts could not endure, they left a framework and a legacy for the British and the rulers of independent India to build upon. How many civil servants think about the IAS’ role in India’s continuing quest for a centralised state structure?

Jitendra Nath Misra is a member of the Indian Foreign Service who served as ambassador to Laos. The views expressed are his own, not of the government of India.