Moving beyond prelims
Yoginder K. Alagh
Posted online: Friday , Nov 27, 2009 at 0339 hrs
Gresham's Law says bad money drives out good money. Since I am an
optimistic kind of blighter, I've an Alagh law: good ideas eventually
drive out bad ones. I once chaired a group which wrote a report on
higher civil service recruitment and training. It took a
year-and-a-half and the country's best and brightest helped us. Some
of it was implemented and some not. The latter included lowering the
age at first entrance, changing over from a Macaulay kind of testing
procedure to finding out the candidate's aptitude and skills for a
civil service career in the 21st century and a lifetime training
programme. The last one was implemented. The earlier two were not. One
does not know why — the report remained a classified document and I
was not given access to it later when I wanted it for some work — but
now someone's put it on the Internet. Dr Moily read the reports and
gracefully
acknowledged and endorsed the recommendations in the reports of the
Administrative Reforms Commission he chaired, beginning with the Tenth
Report. And they've been raised again by the chairman of the UPSC in
the inaugural UPSC Foundation Day Lecture Series earlier this month.
The lowering of the age of first entrance is a serious matter. The
idea of giving as many chances as possible to certain sections of the
population arises out of a concern that poor children should have a
level playing field. I am a great
believer in having candidates from poor families in the civil service,
and fully endorse the point that my former colleague Ram Vilas Paswan
often makes: a collector or SP of SC/ ST origin makes more difference
to outcomes than a minister. Also in JNU, I have seen how the best and
brightest could come from very poor families, if you had the patience
and were fair. But the percentage of candidates from poor SC/ ST
families coming from backward areas was unfortunately declining — a
matter of great concern. The Zakir Hussain Centre of Educational
Research at JNU was asked to find out; they reported that the cost of
preparing for the exams could be quite high — in fact above a lakh of
rupees a year in the urban areas they surveyed. Poor children cannot
pay this cost, so drop out. It was children from better-off sections
who could take advantage of the age relaxations. But there was a sunny
side. My experience of JNU showed that when you do a fair selection
and take only a few — in JNU tens of thousands applied and only nine
hundred were taken — then, at the national level, you get many
extraordinary candidates at lower ages. In the civil services lakhs of
candidates apply so the choice is even wider. At each point in the
scale you get many candidates. Therefore one would get very good
candidates at younger ages, from genuinely poor families, from
backward regions. Some allowance has to be made for candidates from
rural and backward areas, but very old entrants become a drag.
Dr Kalam, then not yet president, spent a lot of time with the
committee. He got the defence establishment's psychiatrists to sit
down with senior service officers and designed personality tests
especially for the civil services.
Services selection boards have been using them for a long time, but
the civil services have been holding out. The tests are not
infallible, of course, and since civil service selections can be
contested the idea is for the selection boards to take the results
into account as one factor. But the main work was to design a new
selection examination procedure taking into account this century's new
needs. The world over it is transparency, accountability, proclivity
towards technological savviness, concerns for the disadvantaged,
ability to network in a society where newer organisational forms are
increasingly solving social problems, energy to pursue objectives
under stress that are being looked for. The UK — the mother country
for our system — the US, France and many others are changing. We
remain in a cul-de-sac of coaching institutes producing the civil
servants of the future.
The first test should, as the UPSC chairman says, be an aptitude test.
Those who qualify should be tested in those skills and aptitudes that
are needed for a services career, governance, environment, technology
and an understanding of an increasingly networked world in terms of
opportunities and threats.
Once in, they have to be given the best training on a continuous
basis, encouraged to specialise, allowed mobility and protected from
the ravages of interference. But that, as they say, is another story.
The writer, a former Union minister, is chairman, Institute of Rural
Management, Anand
------------------------------------
----
INFORMATION OVERLOAD?
Get all ZESTCaste mails sent out in a span of 24 hours in a single mail. Subscribe to the daily digest version by sending a blank mail to ZESTMedia-digest@yahoogroups.com, OR, if you have a Yahoo! Id, change your settings at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTMedia/join/
PARTICIPATE:-
On this list you can share caste news, discuss caste issues and network with like-minded anti-caste people from across India and the world. Just write to zestcaste@yahoogroups.com
TELL FRIENDS TO SIGN UP:-
If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTCaste by sending a blank mail to ZESTCaste-subscribe@yahoogroups.com OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste/join/
Also have a look at our sister list, ZESTMedia: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTMedia/Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
ZESTCaste-digest@yahoogroups.com
ZESTCaste-fullfeatured@yahoogroups.com
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
ZESTCaste-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
No comments:
Post a Comment