- Continued from Part-I on September 30, 2018
It would also mean, to exemplify further, that in the health service for example, there would be an administrative staff (recruited at any of the entry levels, with related job description) to carry out tasks that allow policy to get implemented, while the doctors will work for public service in hospitals. In addition, a group will be selected to do research to formulate policy input for making departmental procedures, and for providing research based technical input for parliamentarians to enact laws. This group will be from (a) among the doctors with credentials and interest to do research, (b) pure researchers from the field of medical sciences, and (c) researchers from other related fields (for example, health economics, environmental science, etc).
Take another example, the law and order service, will also have an administrative sphere populated by staff that is relevant in terms of capacities and tilt towards dealing with maintaining law and order. At the same time, there would be a technocratic sphere, which will formulate policy advice for bringing in place efficient methods and practices for dealing with law and order effectively, and in exploring departmental procedures that are financially sound. For the latter, advice will be sought from technocratic staff of other services, for example from economic service, accountancy service, tax service, etc. Similar will be the case of police service, which will also have both administrative- and technocratic public servants.
Moreover, in the case of judicial service, for example, there will be this administrative staff, responsible for the secretariat work, while the technocratic staff (that is, the judiciary), will be responsible for dispensing justice, along with providing policy input to improve the judicial process. Some of this policy reform would yield rules and procedures, employed/envisaged for running the procedural affairs of the judicial department, while some would flow to the law ministry (the concerned institution here) for brining overarching changes/amendments in the overall constitutional law through the involvement of parliament. Examples above are token examples, to clarify in essence and some detail, the application of reformed public service approach being suggested here in terms of its fundamentals, and it is hoped that with this, will be evolved useful specific reform of a particular service group.
In reforming the public service, it needs to be understood that ministries and departments will act as institutions (providing ‘the rules of the game’), enacting laws and regulations for providing the overall environment for the entire public service. Moreover, a specific service area, will in turn, work as an organisation (‘the players of the game’) within a particular institution. This is how the heterodox literature of institutional economics views institutions and organisations.
Capacity building of the public servants need to be strengthened and streamlined by creating a federal level capacity building organisation, which may be placed under the federal level recruitment commission
Having said, it will be the parliaments who will legislate towards, at first, the very formulation of the respective institutions, including the recruitment commissions, and the recruitment commission regulator, and thereafter to take the input of these institutions in upgrading the whole institutional governance- and incentive structures, so that institutions and organizations can perform optimally through a reformed public service.
Important among other aspects of reforming public service is (a) rationalising the pension/superannuation system, and (b) the welfare benefits received. Pension and superannuation or the contributions towards it need to be rationalised in the light of best practices for which will make sense to evolve over time on the same lines as the Scandinavian countries. Moreover, as Thomas Piketty in his book, ‘Capital in the twenty-first century’, points out that financial instruments like possibilities of investing in stock markets or secondary debt markets could help reduce income inequality gap, since they will also be able to earn high financial returns (unlike quite lower returns on routine saving instruments). Hence, pensions could be placed in mutual funds for example, and a special public service organisation consults such options with employees to allow them useful investments for hedging them against post-retirement risks. Also, as one of the determinants of pensions should also be seeing their rise in real terms, that is after adjusting for price rise or inflation.
To ensure that public servants are being looked after properly for their peace of mind and for retaining their proper attention to work, wider welfare benefits need to be provided to them and to their family in terms of for example, subsidized health and education of their immediate family, including assisting any disability issues. Moreover, housing benefits also need to be rationalised and structured.
Capacity building of the public servants need to be strengthened and streamlined by creating a federal level capacity building organisation, which may be placed under the federal level recruitment commission. This organisation should regulate all the federal- and provincial level public training institutes, and should be the main liaison for arranging trainings in the private sector. The complaints of the public servants against their departments and this organisation with regard to training selection and conduct issue should be entertained through the same complaints redressal system as indicated earlier for the recruitment and promotion issues, among others. This capacity building organisation should clear the names of employees selected for trainings sent by the respective provincial and federal level departments, for their relevance, and there should be a rule of one training, one person, half yearly, unless justified given the special training requirements of that person to groom him in a specialist/expert position.
Online trainings also explored to save on costs. The quality of training programmes should be thoroughly checked and the role of Economic Affairs Division in selecting candidate for national and international trainings should be transferred to the capacity building organisation; which should also work with all departments to develop departmental level think tanks.
(To be continued…)
