The merit of a civil servant

The system now in place for assessing the worth of individual civil servants is faulty. Finding an effective alternative is essential to reform the instruments of governance.

THE quality of art, or even of performing artists, is often debated by critics and aficionados alike; there is disagreement, often acrimonious, about the merit of a particular work of art or of an artist. Assessments, even by so-called impartial bodies can be quite inexplicable to some of us: why, for example, was the Nobel Prize for Literature never given to Joseph Conrad, or Graham Greene or D.H. Lawrence, and was instead given to some obscure writer about whom one had never heard of earlier and never heard of since.

The answer may well be that there are less than impartial people on the bodies that make these selections; that critics are biased, for whatever reason or inducement, into praising one piece of work or an artist while damning others. And behind this is something else again; the competitiveness that exists in all fields of endeavour, including the artistic, even though the practitioners may deny it. It makes them court, wine and dine selectors and assessors, members of committees that judge, and common critics. And while there are some who are persons of honour, and withstand all these blandishments, many, sadly, do not or cannot for extraneous reasons.

I am mentioning this merely to point to the fact that this affliction is virtually all-pervasive in a crucial aspect of our system of governance - namely, the assessment of the worth of individual civil servants. All civil servants are assessed annually by their superiors; initially by the officer under whom they work directly, and then by the person who supervises the work of the immediate superior and the assessed officer and, often, by the head of the department or Ministry. The assessment is supposed to be confidential, that is, the assessed officer is not supposed to know what the assessment has been.

Theoretically, this is not a bad system. The assessed officer may not know what the assessment made of his work is, but in order to make sure that it is favourable, he works hard, is amenable to discipline and makes sure those he works with also work hard and effectively. This, going up the ladder of an office or department or Ministry ensures disciplined and effective work. But does it?

The sad fact is that it does not. To begin with, the assessments made are never ever confidential; the officer assessed invariably finds out what the assessment made of him is. There are many ways in which he can and does find out - it is not difficult, given the porous nature of all governmental activity and the proclivity of officials like private secretaries, who type or keep the assessment reports, to share them with the younger officers who may well, in the course of time, become their superiors. Once an officer knows what has been written about him, he either pleads with his boss to improve the assessment, or, which is more common, he gets to the boss before he actually writes the report and makes his plea then.

The plea is, of course, supported by weeks of obsequious behaviour, gratuitous help offered to the boss to get household chores done, or various other errands performed to ease life for the boss and his family. Then the plea is made, and it never is a plea for a good assessment. That would be a disaster. The plea is that the assessment made should be that the officer is graded `Outstanding'. The reason the assessee will quickly give the boss will be that everyone else among his peers will be given that grading and if he is not, then he will be in effect downgraded, passed over for promotion.

The assessing officer sees the truth of this and usually does just that - grades the assessed officer `Outstanding' when he privately feels he deserves no more than, say `Good'. But `Good' in government offices is the equivalent of `Bad'; it damns the assessed officer and ensures he will be passed over for promotion. `Very Good' is in some ways worse; it damns with faint praise, making someone who is considering the assessed officer for promotion wonder why the assessing officer chose `Very Good' over `Outstanding' - obviously because he just was not good enough.

So those with the grading `Outstanding' are considered for promotion, even though their actual worth may well be `ordinary' (there is not such a grade in government, fortunately), which would not mean he was useless, but just what the word says, ordinary. And if some officer who is upright, does not go out of his way to `cultivate' his boss, he may well end up with a `Very Good' or `Good', ensuring that he is either not promoted or promoted after those graded `Outstanding' and, in any case, will never ever make it to the topmost posts.

The assessing officer's work is not done when he puts down the grading. Government procedures - all well-meaning but utopian - require that he give instances to support his grading. So he casts about for superlatives, which he can use to describe some acts the assessed officer may have performed, and tries to excel what he thinks his colleagues would be writing about the officers they would be assessing. Consequently, what the assessment becomes is not a measure of the merit of the assessed officer but a means of ensuring his advancement.

In other words, we never can get to know just what the worth of an officer is. The reports move so far away from reality that they mean little, and are little better than fiction. One does not have to look far to test the truth of this. Take the assessment reports of all the senior officers who are now behind bars for corruption, theft and extortion, for amassing huge amounts of wealth, even for murder. There is no doubt at all that the reports will all show these officers were graded `Outstanding' and have eloquent testimonies of their unique worth to the government. And there is little to be gained in accusing the senior officers who wrote those reports; they were functioning under the sort of inducements or compulsions I have mentioned earlier.

WHAT, then, is the answer? Must we live with this? Clearly we cannot, but an answer to the basic problem is not easy to find. It would have been, if one could ensure that all assessing officers had a uniform, uncompromising intellectual integrity, and that is a laughable proposition. After all, many former bureaucrats in jail now were assessing officers themselves, and wrote reports on many officers now holding positions of responsibility, and all graded `Outstanding'.

One thing is clear. An assessment by an individual officer has to be avoided. An annual assessment has to be avoided. In place of these, perhaps an assessment, or an examination, once in five years, may be some kind of answer, the nature of the examination being carefully tailored to the requirements of each job at different levels, and supported by an independent assessment by a team of outside experts or officers from other departments working in similar jobs. After all, one is not really interested in assessing the knowledge of an officer about his particular job. If he has been doing it for long enough he will know a hawk from a handsaw. What one is looking for is intelligence, perception, ability to look ahead, to look at the whole picture and not a part, the potential to formulate wise, practical policies and, above all, uncompromising personal integrity. One does not need insiders to assess that.

This may not be a workable answer, and one is not saying it is; all one is saying is that it is roughly on these lines that the government must think if it is to identify the truly good officers they have. That must surely be a vital, and basic, task that the Prime Minister has to address in his efforts to reform the instruments of governance.