Like Ministers in the Modi cabinet, the babus are also accountable

Winds of change are sweeping in the Indian Foreign Service with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar making years spent at the New Delhi headquarters a key criterion for postings to important missions abroad.

This rule plus merit and not mere seniority will be used when the decision to who will be posted to Washington as Indian Ambassador to US or India’s permanent representative to UN in New York is decided after the present incumbent superannates on May 31, 2024. The same methodology was applied when Jaideep Mazumdar and Pavan Kapoor were appointed as Secretary (East) and Secretary (West) respectively. Mazumdar’s place in Vienna is being taken by Shambhu Kumaran from Manila, who spent years in Delhi, as well as Abhay Thakur, part of India’s G-20 brigade, who goes to Russia in place of Pavan Kapoor.

The basic focus of EAM Jaishankar is to strengthen the headquarters with officers who can put in an extra yard as India under PM Narendra Modi makes global strides with focus on new frontiers in the Global South. “ The days of officers moving from one foreign posting to another are over. Good postings will only be given to those who have put in their best in New Delhi without bothering about foreign allowances and big residences abroad,” said a former foreign secretary.

While the Modi government’s move towards merit in Indian bureaucracy is yielding results, avenues to the top are bogged down with the number of senior officers waiting for postings on count of mere seniority. Due to lax standards in the past, virtually all officers are marked between 8.5 to 10 out of 10 in the performance scale as a result of which majority of those who passed the Civil Services Exam some 30 years ago make it to secretary level by just passing around the files.

This performance assessment has also hit the Indian armed forces and the Indian intelligence as nearly all officers with the miniscule exceptions on count of corruption get promoted to apex scales purely on count of inertia of motion rather than any initiatives. This is presently causing a lot of heartburn among officers who have got top notch assessments without requisite performance as the Modi government looks for the best fit for the job at the apex level be it in armed forces or foreign service. On the other hand, the government is saddled with mediocre officers who it can neither post to senstive assignments nor throw them out of the government due to lax standards in the past.