Something amiss in way we select our civil servants

An Indian Administrative Service (IAS) couple in Madhya Pradesh was recently hauled up for amassing property worth more than Rs300 crore.

A raid at an IAS officer’s residence in Mumbai, who is involved in the Adarsh housing scam, yielded more than Rs30 lakh. A former chief secretary of Uttar Pradesh was recently convicted under Prevention of Corruption Act for showing undue favour to an industrialist.

These are only a few cases that have come to public notice. There must be hundreds of other such cases that lie buried and which may never come out in the open.

This is a sad state of affairs, which brings ignominy to the whole nation. If a group of young men and women, chosen through a special competitive examination from among 2,00,000 aspirants and are generally paid well, cannot resist the opportunity to make money the wrong way, who else in the country can you can expect to be honest?

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the greatest votary of civil services and who saw to it that ICS and IP were not scrapped  immediately after Independence, as demanded by some in the Congress party, must be turning in his grave. I do not think he would ever have visualised this kind of decline in the higher echelons of bureaucracy.

The general belief is that civil servants’ corruption goes hand-in-hand with political corruption. On the face of it, this is not illogical. In many states where governments are perceived to be more corrupt than others, we know the bureaucracy is intimidated into gross irregularities.

But I refuse to buy the theory that civil servants are coerced into corruption and that, left alone, they will not stray into dishonesty. I know of a number of cases where senior officers caught for receiving bribes were acting on their own and there was no illegal direction from their ministers.

Take the case of a director in the Union home ministry who got himself compromised while handling various internal security issues, including the one involving proposed restrictions on Blackberry traffic.

An IPS officer who had worked in Narcotics Control Bureau was arrested a year ago for dealing in drugs. It is, therefore, too simplistic to describe civil servant corruption as the offspring only of dishonesty in the ministerial ranks.

There is something fundamentally wrong either with the recruitment method or the training programmes immediately after induction.

This perception is plausible because many of those investigated for corruption in the recent past are relatively young and have spent just about a decade or less in government.

I wonder whether the prime minister or the cabinet secretary have analysed the situation on this basis. I know they are concerned at the deteriorating situation. But I wonder if they have done enough to go to the root of the problem and stem the rot.