It is important to restate the obvious when we wish to meaningfully discuss Public Management per se and the centrality of the Civil Service to such management.
And the obvious is: a civil service of innate intellectual capacity, demonstrated efficiency and assured integrity is fundamental to sustainable public management in a bureaucratic state particularly, and in any ether state generally.
We may clarify at this juncture that in the context of public management, the term 'bureaucratic' is perceived in its pristine purity, unsoiled by the judgmental disdain sometimes attached to it. When we speak of a bureaucratic state we refer to almost all the historical models of the state - starting with the Assyrian empire of the Tigris - Euphrates valley some five thousand years back, to the ancient Chinese empire, to the Mauryas of India, the Abbasid and post Abbasid caliphates/Imamates and Sultanates of the Muslim world towards the end of the first millennium, the Muslim empire in India, the Continental Europe of medieval and modern times, and directly of historical relevance to us, the British Indian State.
It is important to refer to this historical depth and geographical vastness of the bureaucratic state model of public management as the recent experimentation of the Anglo-Saxon model in Pakistan has had its repercussions of a prolonged and painful transition. In the entire spectrum of a large, heterogeneous world, the Anglo-Saxon model remains an aberration, not replicated by the British even in India. The British only incrementally reformed the Chanaky - Moghul model in India.
In the historical prototypes referred to above, the fountainhead of power in a state was the king/emperor/Sultan supported by a small and strong standing army. Public management in the State essentially was concerned with collection of revenues and maintenance of law and order (including collection of intelligence). These functions were performed by carefully chosen civil servants of varying authority and superintendence, both geographically and hierarchically.
The rulers recognised the usefulness of this tool - the civil servant - and, therefore, laid heavy emphasis on their capacity and commitment. The capacity was ensured by a careful selection, generally through connections, and the commitment was managed by recognising the level of reward such civil servants deserved.
Just as a point of reference, it may be mentioned that in the first half of the seventeenth century (Circa 1638) in India, the then counterpart of a grade 17 civil servant (in charge of hundred horsemen) was paid thirty thousand rupees per year. The equivalent of a BS-22 Civil servant (Punj Hazari) was paid fifty thousand rupees per month. These mechanisms ensured a strong, efficient civil service of integrity.
BACKGROUND: A CIVIL SERVICE PARADIGM BY DESIGN In order to appreciate the development of a civil service paradigm in Pakistan, it is essential to recall, in some detail, the specific background of federal and provincial public management in the geographical premises that make up Pakistan now.
The legacy of public management inherited by us in 1947 had incrementally evolved over well more than a hundred years, as a result of a civil service paradigm by design. It did not evolve accidentally - it was meticulously designed and continually refined, again by design and not by default.
In its modern history, our public management can trace its history to the East India Company, starting with 1772 when the company exercised with full authority, its secured rights to collect and administer revenues.
The district became the unit of such management and the supervisor was called the 'Collector'. We notice that the civil service paradigm then introduced was by design, and in these early days, propelled by a desire to create an efficient, strong civil service of integrity. J.W. Kaye in 1853, paid the following compliments to Warren Hastings for reforming the civil service in India.
"During his great experimental period of British rule, there was gradually springing up a race of trained administrators, around whom the old commercial traditions did not cling - who had not graduated in chicanery, or grown grey in fraud and corruption, and who brought to their work not only a sounder intelligence but purer moral perceptions, and a higher sense of what they owed to the people of the soil."
We can notice that efforts to streamline public management through an impeccable civil service were afoot that early. We may also refer to conscious design of the civil service to situate its members in a financial environment, not of unbounded abundance, but always beyond need. While emphasising the importance of main-streaming Indians in the civil services, Sir Thomas Munro, wrote in 1821:
"There can be no hope of any great zeal for improvement when the highest acquirements can lead to nothing beyond some petty office and can confer neither wealth nor honour.
While the prospects of the natives are so bounded, every project for bettering their characters must fail; and no such project can have the smallest chance of success unless some of these objects are placed within their reach, for the sake of which men are urged to exertion in other countries."
While these measures were aimed at ensuring efficient public management by a committed civil service of integrity, a major revolutionary measure introduced in the Indian Civil Service was selection of civil servants on merit, fairly and competitively, a paradigm not pursued anywhere else previously, except ancient China. It may be interesting to quote from a speech of 1853 by Lord Macaulay.
"There is something plausible in the proposition that you should allow him (the Governor General) to take able men where-ever he finds them.
But my firm opinion is that the day on which the civil service of India ceases to be a close service, will be the beginning of an age of jobbing - the most monstrous, the most extensive and the most perilous system of abuse in the distribution of patronage that we have even witnessed.
Every Governor General, would take out with him or would soon be followed by a crowd of nephews, first and second cousins, friends, sons of friends, and political hangers-on. While every steamer arriving from the Red Sea would carry to India some adventurer bearing with him testimonials from the people of England......"
According to the Act of 1853, it was decided that recruitment to the covenanted civil service was to be made on the basis of an open competitive examination. This was seventeen years before Gladstone could introduce this system in Britain, and perhaps, as a system, the first place in the world outside ancient China. Thus the civil service paradigm, by design, ensured quality public management.
A Public Service Commission was appointed in 1886 under the chairmanship Sir C.U. Aitchison. Among other steps to include 'natives' in the Indian Civil Service, the commission recommended that the cadres of covenanted civil service should be reduced to an elite cadre limiting its number to only the important administrative appointments, and some smaller appointments for ensuring training for junior officers.
The recommendations of the Aitchison Commission formed the main character and complexion of the ICS. Thus were laid the foundations of a strong civil service. To recall my earlier observation that the civil services of India were designed to be staffed by men of integrity, I may quote from the report of the Islington Commission of 1917:
"Government should pay so much, and so much only to their employees as is necessary to obtain recruits of the right stamp, and then maintain them in such a degree of comfort and dignity as will shield them from temptation and keep them efficient for the term of their service."
So the civil service paradigm we inherited in 1947, was designed to serve the sovereign in London and the subjects in India effectively, efficiently - and with dedication and integrity.
THE PARADIGM ENSURED:
(a) That only persons of quality and integrity formed the civil service;
(b) Separation of functions were clearly defined and hierarchical relationships were not adversarial but complementary in nature;
(c) Social justice to the citizen was the primary responsibility of the civil service unless it was in conflict with the sovereign's interest; and
(d) The concept of an elitist, generalist cadre asserted and refined its time-tested value.
(To be continued)
(The writer is a former Establishment Secretary to the Government of Pakistan.)
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