Babus to get ‘trained’ by top management gurus

The government wants its bureaucrats to be trained by the best management gurus, to meet the 21st century’s challenges. And not just of India but the world.

The government is going beyond the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy for Administration (LBSNAA) and is tying up with top private management schools.

Indian Administrative Service and Indian Police Service officers, and diplomats are being trained at the Indian School of Business (ISB), Management Development Institute (Gurgaon) and other top management schools that have tie-ups with Wharton, Duke, MIT, Harvard and Kellogg for about a year.

In seven years, there have been midterm career training programmes in public policy and management at the IIMs, which too have tie-ups with foreign institutes like the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.

“The government is making efforts to provide quality training to its officers. It is no more limiting itself to government institutes. It is going beyond its own training institutes and tying up with private management schools like the ISB for mid-term training programmes for its officers,” a senior ISB official said.

The courses and agendas for student-bureaucrats are tailor-made. From last year, the ISB trained about 70 Indian Foreign Service (IFS) officers on economic diplomacy. Besides, there is a two-week training programme of newly-recruited IPS officers. They return when they become superintendents of police or hold other senior posts. About 100 IPS officers have sat through these classes.

Among the student-bureaucrats were about 120 officials from the railways with at least 15 years experience and 30 secretary-level officers.