Bureaucrat bonus to be tied to performance

If all goes well, hundreds of bureaucrats working in about 62 different departments of the central government will move to a performance-linked annual incentive system.

The civil servants will be assessed every year on various parameters and the annual incentives will depend on the goods they deliver during the year. The government has already started the evaluation of the civil servants though it would take some more time before linking it to the incentives.

“This year (2010-11) will be the first full year of evaluation. The idea is to do it for two consecutive years and then link it to incentives. This should happen in 2012-13,” Prajapati Trivedi, secretary, performance management, Government of India, said.

He did not reveal the exact metrics used, saying the document, called the Results Framework Document, is with the prime minister’s office.

The model that has been worked out so far, pegs the minimum score for a bureaucrat at 70 out of 100 to qualify for incentives.

The incentives too would be linked to the savings an officer causes during the process of execution of the government schemes and 15% of those savings would go to the officer as incentive.

However, the total quantum of incentive, too, would be capped. “For a cabinet secretary, the incentive would not go beyond 40% of his basic salary,” Trivedi explained.

Admitting that the country is off track in achieving the Millennium Development Goals, he said that the reasons for the slippage were identified to be inefficiencies in delivering public services, weak accountability system and gaps in the implementation.

There must be some serious consequences for any slippage. Some heads should roll. If there is a scam, some money will go out to someone. But, if there is a slippage in implementation of programmes, people will die. But, there is no proper accountability. We simply give excuses for non-performance,” he said while speaking a programme in the Institute of Public Enterprises (IPE) on Thursday.

According to him, in the age of Google, it is easy to make a policy but it is the implementation that holds the key.

“There are multiple supervisory systems and principals with multiple goals. They are often conflicting. Still, no body is held accountable resulting in a not-me syndrome. The new system will make every official accountable and will also help in plugging the leakages in the system,” he said.

In fact, various pay commissions have been recommending the introduction of performance linked incentive schemes for the civil servants though the proposals never took a shape. On this he said, “It is a fact that the pay commissions have been recommending the performance linkage. But, there was never a system to capture the performance to make use of it in evaluating the officials. Now, there is a system in place.”

However, the new evaluation model is not being imposed on the states. “We can’t ask the states to do it. But, several states or about 10 of them are keen on doing it and are seeking our support in putting in place system,” Trivedi said.

Additionally, the centre is also keen on making all the 62 departments and 760 subordinate and attached offices fit for ISO certification. The government is likely to apply for the certification shortly so that the audits would be conducted in every department for improving the internal systems.