Wake up, UPSC!

Articles of Faith

The way Puja Khedkar conned her way into becoming an Indian Administrative Services officer has revealed serious problems with the functioning of the Union Public Service Commission.

The UPSC, on its part, issued a statement on what it plans to do about this but two things in the statement caught my eye: “constitutional obligations” and “constitutional mandate”. The UPSC is not saying this lightly -- it is a constitutional body at par with the Election Commission of India and the Comptroller and Auditor General of India. It is not just responsible for the famous annual exam, but for many other aspects of India’s central bureaucracy. State bureaucracies have their own Public Service Commissions.

As constitutional bodies go, the UPSC is one of the older ones. In its earlier avatars, it was called the Federal Public Service Commission (under the Government of India Act, 1935) or just Public Service Commission (under the Government of India Act, 1919). Till independence, it reported directly to the Secretary of State for India in Britain. As old as the UPSC is, the entrance examination to recruit all-India services officers is even older.

While the IAS started as the Imperial Civil Service (ICS) during British rule, a written exam to select the best scholars to the State bureaucracy was started some 1,500 years ago in ancient China, a system that continued uninterrupted till the 20th century. The British who encountered this system in the 19th century were so impressed that they adopted it for India, to select the best and brightest to run the bureaucracy. Even as China under Mao Zedong briefly abandoned this system of recruitment, it has continued uninterrupted in India.

In a land where jobs were given on the basis of caste, religion and relations, the idea of jobs being earned by passing an examination was nothing short of revolutionary. In a land where jobs were held at the mercy of someone in power, keeping a job only on the basis of performance was a radical idea. A certain class of Indians, even under British rule, saw this opportunity and took it. Whatever their views on the ICS itself and individual officers, few in the independence movement seriously entertained the idea of changing the system of recruitment and management of the bureaucracy. Even Motilal Nehru’s draft constitution in 1928 proposed that the Public Service Commission should be a constitutional body.

So, it should come as no surprise that an entire chapter of the Constitution (Part XIV) is concerned with the bureaucracy at the Union and state levels and as many as nine 9 Articles in the Constitution deal with the Union and state PSCs. The importance of PSCs is also highlighted by the fact that members of the PSCs enjoy protections from removal on par with that of Supreme Court and High Court judges.

The debate on these three provisions were spread across three days in the Constituent Assembly, and covered a range of issues. One whole day of the CA’s discussions were consumed by the debate on the provisions relating to the PSCs. Many members (Yashwant Rai, C Nagappa, among others) were unhappy with the way in which the Union and state Public Service Commissions had functioned under British rule and wanted changes to ensure impartiality and efficiency of the members, and especially to ensure representation for Dalits, Adivasis and backward classes.

These criticisms were responded to in detail by Ananthasayanam Ayyangar, Hriday Nath Kunzru and Ambedkar. The response was that good or bad individuals aside, the Constitution was being drafted to ensure that the PSCs work independently of government pressures and thus to ensure that the bureaucracy as a whole works independent of government or political pressure. Even the criticisms of the provisions were, at best, tweaks to ensure a little more fairness and quality but not wholesale changes.

However, as with the judiciary, so with the bureaucracy: constitutional protections don’t matter if the individuals in office don’t want to act independently. All the constitutional provisions and structures will not create independent institutions if individuals don’t cultivate “constitutional morality”. Perhaps it’s time for the members of the UPSC and state PSCs to think deeply about their true purpose, as summed up beautifully by Ananthasayanam Ayyangar: “A healthy, efficient and honest public service is the very backbone of a government or its administration.”