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Public Servants in Modern India: Who Are They?

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-03008-7_96-1

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Public Servants in Modern India: Who Are
They?

Shilpa Viswanath

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
The Difference Between Civil Servants and Public Servants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
The Case of the Undocumented Public Servants: Why Does It Matter? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Abstract
The practice of public administration in modern India is synonymous with career
bureaucrats, also known as civil servants, who are hired on professional merit via
arduous exams called the Civil Service Examinations (CSE) conducted by India’s
Union Public Service Commission (UPSC). These civil servants receive institu-
tional tenure and head public sector institutions and government departments.
While public administration scholars have studied civil servants and their over-
arching context in Indian polity and society, much less has been spoken about
“public servants.” Public servants on the other hand include government officers
employed (at various strata) in the armed forces, in the judicial system, in the
election commission, and in other public sector agencies in assorted capacities.
Public servants who are managed by the civil servants form the fabric of Indian
bureaucracy and are street-level bureaucrats administrating government programs
and policies. This chapter draws attention to the gaps in data and knowledge
surrounding public servants and personnel policies concerning them.

Keywords
Public Servant · Civil Servant · Bureaucracy · Indian Public Administration

S. Viswanath (*)
Department of Public Management, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, New York City,
NY, USA

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 1

H. Sullivan, H. Dickinson (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Public Servant,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03008-7_96-1
2 S. Viswanath

Introduction

In unassuming terms, the expanse of the Indian bureaucracy is gargantuan and

labyrinthian (Mathur 2012). Yet, study of the Indian bureaucracy is often synony-
mous with the role and performance of India’s elite civil servants and more specif-
ically the Indian Administrative Services (IAS) (Maheshwari 2006). The civil
servants while an important part of Indian bureaucracy are only the tip of the
bureaucratic iceberg – what lies beneath are the bulk of the supporting personnel,
the government employees also known as public servants. While knowledge on
Indian civil servants is available in plenty including details of their career trajecto-
ries, their training, and their performance (see: Banik 2001; Benbabaali 2008;
Bertrand et al. 2015; Bhambhri 1972; Bragg 2004; Burra 2010; Gupta
2016; Gupta et al. 2006; Maheshwari 2006; Sarkar 2018; Tangirala 2010), fewer
insights are available with regard to personnel matters of public servants employed
by the central, state, and local governments in numerous capacities. The purpose of
this book chapter is to identify the gaps in data and research on public servants in
India and its implications on public administration praxis.
Modern Indian bureaucracy has its origins in the British rule. The British rule in
India which lasted from 1858 until 1947 was made possible with the enormous steel
frame structure of the Indian Civil Service (I.C.S.), the Indian Police (I.P.), and the
Indian Postal Service (I.P.S.), all exceedingly elite cadres of overwhelmingly British
civil servants directly recruited by the British Government to administer the British
Rule in colonial India (Alexander 1982; Potter 1973). This ironclad bureaucratic
invention of the British began facing its first threats between 1915 and 1947 when a
dearth of British bureaucrats in the I.C.S. made way for more Indians to enter the
civil service and hold dominant positions in the colonial bureaucracy (Potter 1973).
Ultimately, with India gaining independence from the British in 1947, the remnants
of the colonial I.C.S., I.P., and I.P.S were replaced with the Indian Administrative
Service. The beginnings of the modern Indian state can be traced to a decision made
by newly independent India’s Deputy Prime Minister, Sadar Vallabhai Patel who
envisioned India having a centralized, nationwide administrative structure to aid the
integration of many culturally and linguistically diverse states, thus granting the
Indian Administrative Service a prime position at the apex of the bureaucracy
(Benbabaali 2008). Over the following decades, the postcolonial legacy of the
government’s determined steadfastness to build an elite class of civil servants via
centrally administered examinations and political interference continues to be prev-
alent in India as in many other Asian countries (Poocharoen and Brillantes 2013).
Scholars have long argued that the Indian civil service has shown a tendency to
reinforce the characteristics of the Hindu caste system including – high power
distance, status consciousness, centralization of decision-making, and the need to
depend upon a patron (Kumar 2007), thereby making it a distinctive phenomenon to
study. Furthermore, as Gupta (2016) notes:

Indians are highly status conscious. Historical legacy of caste system that fails to die in our
society has had such a pervasive influence on the Indian psyche that there is a high
Public Servants in Modern India: Who Are They? 3

acceptance (and at times expectation) of hierarchy and high power difference with bosses
and subordinates. Indians feel comfortable in the superior-subordinate framework and peer
group relationships induce anxiety till the peers are ranked on some real or imaginary
dimension (Sinha 1990) (p. 11)

This historical and cultural recapitulation helps us understand how civil servants
in general and IAS officers in particular are synonymous with the bureaucracy itself.
From a public sector human resource management perspective, the existence of
India’s public sector employees or public servants has escaped scholarly imagina-
tion. This chapter makes a case for the urgent and unmet need to study Indian public
servants and street-level bureaucrats, and the public personnel policy concerning
them.

The Difference Between Civil Servants and Public Servants

This section of the chapter establishes the administrative and hierarchical differences
between the civil servants and public servants in India. Civil servants are recruited
into the Indian Civil Service based on professional merit via strenuous exams called
the Civil Service Examinations (CSE) conducted by India’s Union Public Service
Commission (UPSC). These civil servants receive institutional tenure and head
public sector institutions and government departments across regions. As Banik
(2001) notes – “the civil services in India are legal-rational, hierarchically organized,
generalist, technically competent and are expected to remain politically neutral.”
(p. 108). The IAS officers occupy the highest administrative positions in public
policy making at both the state and central level and serve as administrative heads of
all ministries and departments and are considered India’s only “multifunctional”
government service in charge of running every sector of the government (Banik
2001). IAS officers are also credited with the ability to attract and disburse central
government sponsored grants aimed at economic development implying that more
effective IAS officers have more impact on policy implementation at the local levels
(Bertrand et al. 2015). The Indian Civil Services comprises of nearly 26 categories
listed in Table 1. This table provides an overview of the different cadre of civil
servants, their primary training institutes and the approximate cadre strength in the
year 2018. There are approximately 37,301 civil servants in India commanding the
numerous central and state government entities. Table 1 provides a composition of
India’s civil servant cadre and strength. The data in table 1 was compiled using the
publicly accessible resources from the Union Public Service Commission website.
India’s civil servants are stratified into three broad categories: The first category is
the All India Service, which comprises civil servants in the Indian Administrative
Service (IAS), the Indian Police Service (IPS), and the Indian Foreign Service (IFS)
who serve the national government of India as well as individual states. Additionally,
IAS officers are deployed as chief executives of various public sector undertakings
or work in multilateral organizations like the World Bank, the International Mone-
tary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, the United Nations, and its agencies. The
4 S. Viswanath

Table 1 Civil servants cadre and strength

Sanctioned
strength of
Cadre Dedicated training institute cadre
Indian Administrative Service Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of 4926
(IAS) Training
Indian Police Service (IPS) Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police 3894
Academy
Indian Foreign Service (IFS) Sushma Swaraj Foreign Service Institute 2780
Indian Audit and Accounts National Academy of Audits and Accounts 695
Service (IA&AS)
Indian Civil Accounts Service National Institute of Financial Management 226
(ICAS) and Institute of Government Accounts and
Finance
Indian Defence Accounts Institute of Government Accounts and 291
Service (IDAS) Finance
Indian Defence Estates National Institute of Defence Estates 650
Service (IDES) Management
Indian Forest Service Indira Ghandhi National Forest Academy 3131
Indian Information Service Indian Institute of Mass Communication 189
(IIS)
Indian Ordinance Factories National Academy of Defence Production 1760
Service (IOFS)
Indian Postal Service (IPoS) Rafi Ahmed Kidwai National Postal Academy 561
Indian Railway Accounts Indian Railway Institute of Financial 800
Service (IRAS) Management
Indian Railway Personnel National Academy of Indian Railways 418
Service (IRPS)
Indian Railway Protection Railway Protection Force Training Center 478
Force Service (IRPFS)
Indian Railway Traffic Service Indian Railway Institute of Transportation 900
(IRTS) Management
Indian Statistical Service (ISS) National Statistical System Training Academy 814
Indian Telecommunication National Telecommunications Institute for 1690
Service (ITS) Policy Research, Innovation and Training
Indian Radio Regulatory National Central Public Works Department n/a
Service (IRRS) Academy
Indian Revenue Service (IRS- National Academy of Direct Taxes 4192
IT)
Indian Revenue Service (IRS- National Academy of Customs Indirect Taxes 5583
C&CE) and Narcotics
Indian Trade Service (ITS) Indian Institute of Foreign Trade 180
Armed Forces Headquarters Defence Headquarters Training Institute 3235
Civil Service (AFHCS)
Delhi, Andaman and Nicobar Directorate of Training, Union Territories n/a
Islands Civil Service Civil Services
(DANICS)
(continued)
Public Servants in Modern India: Who Are They? 5

Table 1 (continued)
Sanctioned
strength of
Cadre Dedicated training institute cadre
Delhi, Andaman and Nicobar Police Training College 434
Islands Police Service
(DANIPS)
Puducherry Civil Service Directorate of Training, Union Territories 62
(PCS) Civil Services
Puducherry Police Service Police Academy 62
(PPS)
Total 37,301

second category is the Central Services, which comprise civil servants serving in
leadership positions heading central and state departments under the affiliated
ministries. The third category comprises civil servants specifically serving the
union territories of India. The recruitment, training, and retention of civil servants
involve elaborate processes and have been extensively studied both historically and
currently in the field of public administration. Additionally, there are specialized
institutions dedicated to training civil servants across the different cadres, as detailed
in Table 1. Recent recruitment trends of civil servants in India show a declining
demand for the elite cadre of IAS, IPS, and IFS officers. The Indian Parliamentary
Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, and Law and Justice has
observed that vacancies of civil servants in the country had reached an “alarming
level” and, in 2018, there was a shortage of 1,449 IAS, 970 IPS, and about 560 IFS
officers (Dhingra 2020 “UPSC to recruit 100 fewer civil servants than last year
despite shortage.” The Print). While personnel information (historical and real
time) on Indian civil servants is systematically documented and made publicly
available by the UPSC, the Department of Personnel and Training and various
affiliated central government ministries, there is much ambiguity surrounding the
employment of public servants at the center, state, and local levels of government. A
journalistic report in India’s national daily Times of India (“Number of Government
Employees? Nobody Knows” 2015) talks about the conundrum regarding public
sector employee statistics. The report goes on to illustrate how three different central
government bodies – the Seventh Pay Commission, the Finance Ministry and the
Labor Ministry’s Directorate General of Employment and Training – have put
forward disparate figures of public servants employed in the central government
over the same time period. If training of the bureaucrats is thought to be key to
running a legitimate administrative apparatus, then the absence of any information
on training the vast majority of public servants seems quite hypocritical in a modern
democratic state.
Public servants in India include government officers employed (at various strata)
in the armed forces, in the judicial system, in the election commission, and in other
capacities as defined by Section 21 of The Indian Penal Code. Table 2 consolidates
the various parameters defining a public servant in present day India: public servants
6 S. Viswanath

Table 2 Parameters defining public servants in India

1. Every Commissioned Officer in the Military, Naval or Air Forces of India
2. Every Judge including any person empowered by law to discharge, whether by himself or as a
member of any body of persons, any adjudicatory functions
3. Every officer of a Court of Justice (including a liquidator, receiver, or commissioner) whose
duty it is, as such officer, to investigate or report on any matter of law or fact, or to make,
authenticate, or keep any document, or to take charge or dispose of any property, or to execute any
judicial process, or to administer any oath, or to interpret, or to preserve order in the Court, and
every person specially authorized by a Court of Justice to perform any of such duties
4. Every juryman, assessor, or member of a panchayat assisting a Court of Justice or public servant
5. Every arbitrator or other person to whom any cause or matter has been referred for decision or
report by any Court of Justice, or by any other competent public authority
6. Every person who holds any office by virtue of which he is empowered to place or keep any
person in confinement
7. Every officer of the Government whose duty it is, as such officer, to prevent offences, to give
information of offences, to bring offenders to justice, or to protect the public health, safety, or
convenience
8. Every officer whose duty it is, as such officer, to take, receive, keep, or expend any property on
behalf of the Government, or to make any survey, assessment, or contract on behalf of the
Government, or to execute any revenue process, or to investigate, or to report, on any matter
affecting the pecuniary interests of the Government, or to make, authenticate, or keep any
document relating to the pecuniary interests of the Government, or to prevent the infraction of any
law for the protection of the pecuniary interests of the Government
9. Every officer whose duty it is, as such officer, to take, receive, keep, or expend any property, to
make any survey or assessment or to levy any rate or tax for any secular common purpose of any
village, town, or district or to make, authenticate, or keep any document for the ascertaining of the
rights of the people of any village, town, or district
10. Every person who holds any office in virtue of which he is empowered to prepare, publish,
maintain, or revise an electoral roll or to conduct an election or part of an election
11. Every person in the service or pay of the Government or remunerated by fees or commission
for the performance of any public duty by the Government
12. Every person in the service or pay of a local authority, a corporation established by or under a
Central, Provincial, or State Act or a Government company as defined in section 617 of the
Companies Act, 1956
13. Every person employed or engaged by any public body in the conduct and supervision of any
examination recognized or approved under any law. The expression “public body” includes a
University, Board of Education or other body, either established by or under a Central or State Act
or under the provisions of the Constitution of India or constituted by the Government; and a local
authority
Source: Indian Penal Code (IPC) Section 21

who are managed by the many cadres of civil servants form the fabric of Indian
bureaucracy and are administrators of government programs and policies at the
street-level.
According to Table 2 public servants specifically comprise of officers in the
military, navy, or air force; judges, arbitrators, jurypersons, assessors, officers of
court; persons employed in law enforcement and regulatory capacity; persons with
the ability to collect taxes and many more. Trends in employment of public servants
Public Servants in Modern India: Who Are They? 7

in India are similar to the declining trends of civil servant recruitments. According to
the central government’s Seventh Pay Commission, (a) central government share in
organized sector employment has gradually decreased over the past 15 years. In
2012, central government employed 8.5% of the organized workforce. This was a
decline of about 4%, from 12.4% in 1994; and (b) between 2006 and 2014, all central
government ministries with the exception of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA),
witnessed a decrease in the number of employees. Without access to accurate
longitudinal data on public servant employment, it is challenging to predict future
trends in public sector employment and craft effective personnel policies. Despite
unobtainable facts, one approach to contextualize public servants in India is by
assessing the spread of the Indian bureaucracy at the local, state, and central levels of
government. Tables 3 and 4 provide an overview of the breadth of public sector
employment at the central and state governments. This data was consolidated from
central government ministry websites and state government websites.
Table 3 offers a comprehensive list of 41 central government ministries and the
number of government entities under each of these ministries. The data presented in
Table 3 includes central government departments, statutory bodies, autonomous
bodies, boards, commissions, associations, and public sector undertakings. There
are approximately a total of 711 central government entities existing under the 41
central government ministries. Additionally, there exist 25 tribunals, 31 independent
intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and 160 central government funded
educational institutions. All persons employed in these exceptionally voluminous
927 central government entities are public servants. We can infer that a civil servant
spearheads each of these entities but who are the public servants employed by the
central government underneath this top level? What demographics do they belong to
and what training do they receive to perform their jobs for the government of India?
In terms of research and scholarship surrounding public servants employed by the
central government, none exists. All public sector human resource efforts by the
Government of India’s Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances, and Pensions’
Department of Personnel & Training are geared singularly towards the select cadres
of civil servants. Similarly, Table 4 provides an overview of the state government
departments, institutions, and organizations. There are approximately 6437 state
government entities across the 36 states and union territories of India. Once again,
we can corroborate that each of these departments is headed by a civil servant, but
there are no accessible estimates of the precise number of public servants employed
by the state governments of India and regarding the personnel policies aimed at
them. The purpose of this chapter is to draw attention to the underreported indicators
on central government and state government public servants in modern India.
8 S. Viswanath

Table 3 Overview of Central Government Bureaucracy

Affiliated Entities (Departments, Statutory Bodies,
Regulatory Bodies, Autonomous Bodies, Board,
Commissions, Public Sector Undertakings, Tribunals,
Educational Institutions, Independent Bodies, Intelligence
Central Government Ministers Agencies/Departments)
1. Agriculture 23
2. Civil Aviation 8
3. Coal 6
4. Commerce/Industries/Business 59
5. Communication and 18
Information Technology
6. Consumer Affairs, Food and 13
Public Administration
7. Corporate Affairs 8
8. Culture 38
9. Defence 51
10. Earth Sciences 7
11. Environment and Forests 34
12. External Affairs 2
13. Finance 27
14. Food Processing Industry 2
15. Health and Family Welfare 20
16. Heavy Industries and Public 5
Enterprise
17. Home Affairs 88
18. Housing and Urban Poverty 7
19. Human Resource 46
Development
20. Information and Broadcasting 24
21. Labor and Employment 14
22. Law and Justice 8
23. Micro, Small and Medium 6
Enterprises
24. Mines 7
25. Minority Affairs 5
26. New and Renewable Energy 3
27. Panchayat Raj 3
28. Personnel, Public Grievances 10
and Pensions
29. Petroleum and Natural Gas 7
30. Power 11
31. Railways 24
32. Road Transport and Highways 3
33. Rural Development 4
34. Science and Technology 29
(continued)
Public Servants in Modern India: Who Are They? 9

Table 3 (continued)
Affiliated Entities (Departments, Statutory Bodies,
Regulatory Bodies, Autonomous Bodies, Board,
Commissions, Public Sector Undertakings, Tribunals,
Educational Institutions, Independent Bodies, Intelligence
Central Government Ministers Agencies/Departments)
35. Social Justice and 10
Empowerment
36. Statistics and Program 5
Empowerment
37. Skill Development and 2
Entrepreneurship
38. Steel 3
39. Textiles 30
40. Women and Child 1
Development
41. Women and Child 40
Development
Total 711

The Case of the Undocumented Public Servants: Why Does It

Matter?

The study of India’s public servants matters from the theoretical perspective of
representative bureaucracy and, street level bureaucrats. The theory of representa-
tive bureaucracy (Kingsley 1944) posits that a bureaucracy has to be representative
of the community it serves since bureaucratic behavior is influenced by the social
and cultural background of the individual bureaucrats. Furthermore, strong group
identity can catalyze a bureaucrat to transform from a passive to an active agent,
prompting them to actively look out for the interests of the group they represent
(Mosher 1968). Representative bureaucracy in a heterogenous democracy is crucial
for enchancing organizational diversity, bureaucratic accountability, citizen trust
and citizen’s willingness to coproduce in order to achieve democratic goals
(Riccucci and Van Ryzin 2017). Drawing from this notion that in a democracy, the
bureaucracy ought to be representative, the Indian government has instituted reser-
vation policies and a quota systems for underrepresented minorities to enter and
serve in the highly competitive Indian Administrative Services and other cadres of
civil service (Benbabaali 2008). However, IAS officers themselves are subject to
rapid and often arbitrary transfers from their posts in state and central government
departments throughout their careers (Banik 2001). Therefore, one can argue that it
is the public servants who continue to stay on in their nontransferable positions and
serve as real street level bureaucrats interacting on a daily basis with the citizenry.
Street level public servants and their bureaucratic discretion can determine the
implementation of public policy at the grassroots by being passively, actively, and
10 S. Viswanath

Table 4 Overview of State Government Bureaucracy

Government Entities (Apex Bodies, Department, Attached Offices,
Boars, Statutory Bodies, District Offices, Municipal Offices,
State Panchayat Offices, Judiciary)
1. Andaman and 27
Nicobar Island
2. Andhra Pradesh 232
3. Arunachal Pradesh 96
4. Assam 217
5. Bihar 188
6. Chandigarh 78
7. Chattisgarh 148
8. Dadar and Nagar 18
Haveli
9. Damn and Diu 16
10. Delhi 148
11. Goa 104
12. Gujrat 394
13. Haryana 242
14. Himachal Pradesh 177
15. Jammu and 187
Kashmir
16. Jharkhand 138
17. Karnataka 427
18. Kerala 378
19. Lakshadweep 33
20. Madhya Pradesh 245
21. Maharashtra 357
22. Manipur 93
23. Meghalaya 110
24. Mizoram 114
25. Nagaland 66
26. Odisha 265
27. Puducherry 77
28. Punjab 177
29. Rajasthan 244
30. Sikkim 66
31. Tamil Nadu 290
32. Telangana 189
33. Tripura 122
34. Uttar Pradesh 172
35. Uttarakhand 349
36. West Bengal 253
Total 6437
Source: Directory of the Indian Government. National Informatics Center (NIC), Ministry of
Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India
Public Servants in Modern India: Who Are They? 11

symbolically representative of the communities they serve (see: Lipsky 1980).

Similarly, questions surrounding inefficiency and corruption are always concerning
the large-scale politicization of IAS officers, their obstructiveness, rigidity, impervi-
ousness, and their extreme aversion to reform targeting crony capitalism in India
(Godbole 2001; Gupta 2016; Rana and Agarwal 2012; Saxena 2010). The study of
corruption and patronage in the Indian bureaucracy is often equated with the
existence of corruption and patronage in the hiring and promotion of Indian Civil
Servants (see Poocharoen and Brillantes 2013). While critiques of performance and
public ethics are exclusively aimed at the civil servants, the study of performance
and ethical behavior of the ‘invisible’ public servants remains unspoken.
Furthermore, the idea of public service ethic (Perry 1997) raises serious questions
for public sector human resource management – how can the attributes of public
service ethics be identified and measured in Indian public servants and street-level
bureaucrats? What are the ramifications of public service ethics for effective program
implementation in modern India? Can favorable public service ethics contribute to
increasing levels of citizen trust in the Indian government? For instance, India ranks
40th in the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index and fares
poorly on many other country-level corruption perception indices, such as the
World Bank’s Control of Corruption index (-0.19), the Transparency International’s
Corruption Perception Index (80th), or the corruption index of the International
Country Risk Guide that are based on surveying the business community or citizens.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index in its Executive
Opinion Survey asked respondents to select the five most problematic factors for
doing business in India and to rank them between 1 (most problematic) and 5. Table 5

Table 5 Factors perceived as most problematic in India for doing business

Corruption 9.2
Access to financing 8.5
Tax rates 7.9
Inadequate supply of infrastructure 7.0
Poor work ethic in national labor force 7.0
Inadequately educated workforce 6.6
Government instability/coups 6.6
Inflation 6.4
Inefficient government bureaucracy 5.9
Foreign currency regulations 5.7
Restrictive labor regulations 5.5
Crime and theft 4.9
Poor public health 4.9
Tax regulations 4.8
Insufficient capacity to innovate 4.7
Policy instability 4.3
Source: World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Index 2017–2018
12 S. Viswanath

presents the score across factors (the scores corresponds to the responses weighted
according to their rankings).
While this data does not explicitly distinguish factors as belonging to the public
sector and to the private sector workforce, it prominently indicates inefficient
government bureaucracy, government instability, an inadequately skilled workforce,
poor work ethic, and poor public health as factors directly associated with public
sector employees and their performance, their skill levels, and their work ethic. To
allow public administration researchers and public sector human resource practi-
tioners in India to be able to identify personnel factors required for a competent
administration, to recruit and retain the brightest and best public sector employees, to
attain demographic representation at all levels of the bureaucracy, and to motivate
public sector employees to perform at their best, data on public servants is essential
to better understand public sector organizations. Practitioners and scholars need
access to public servants to conduct interviews and experiments or to survey them
to gather data points that help in better management of public servants and the
agencies they serve. Consequently, it is important that Government of India’s
Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances, and Pensions’ Department of Personnel
& Training make efforts to build training programs for public servants working in the
central and state governments, and, to periodically collect and publish data about
their performance, productivity, and employment trends. As the challenges of
administering a pluralistic modern India get more complex, public administration
as a practical field of study requires to be developed autonomous of the civil services
(Manoharan et al. 2020). Furthermore, public servants from all strata of the bureau-
cracy ought to have access to public administration pedagogy and its cumulative
knowledge developed by rigorous theory formulation and empirical testing. Moving
ahead it is imperative to craft, implement and document personnel training policies
and human resource practices geared at public sector employees or public servants at
large, not solely at the elite cadre of civil servants. The education and training of
public servants of India should be a topic of discussion in a modern democratic state.
While this chapter establishes the gaps in existing data, the next major task is to
identify what types of data are required to be collected and how this data might help
build a more efficient system that is both representative and rooted in better
personnel ethics. Table 6 presents the types of data that can be collected with regard
to public servants and the purpose the data might serve.
Periodic data generation in itself is not a sufficient condition to create a repre-
sentative bureaucracy or a system of personnel ethics. On the contrary, periodic data
generation will simply allow agency heads, department leadership, mangers in the
public sector, and researchers to identify the organizational gaps in representation, in
training, in retention and recruitment, and other personnel needs of public servants in
India. Initiatives to generate data on public servants and use this data to improve
performance and inform a system of public personnel ethics will require both strong
political will and investment of tax rupees. Furthermore, generating and maintaining
data on public servants can make the bureaucratic decisional and power structure that
is so tremendously vertical become more lateral. Additionally, it may challenge and
inform a new system of personnel ethics which shifts the focus of corruption, crony
Public Servants in Modern India: Who Are They?
Table 6 Types of public servant data
Type of data What does the data measures?
Survey data of Surveys can measure a number of
public servants variables including public servant
perception of job satisfaction,
work-life balance, supervisory
support, intention to leave,
promotion, and growth prospects,
commuting patterns and mobility
and more
Longitudinal data of Longitudinal data can measure the
public servants effect of technological and
structural changes on public
servant productivity, the effect of
wages on public servant turnover
rates, returns on public servant
training and development
programs, effect of political
decisions on public service
motivation, and loyalty to
government
Demographic data Demographic data can measure a
of public servants number of variables including age,
sex, gender, socio-economic class,
caste, disabilities, educational
qualifications, cultural
competency, and language fluency
of public servants
Performance data of Performance data can measure
public servants technical contributions, decision-
making skills and innovations of
public servants that factor into the
inputs, outputs, processes and
outcomes of organizational
functions
Remuneration data This data can measure wages,
of public servants other forms of remuneration,
health benefits, disability benefits,
other employee benefits, sick
leave, paid leave, travel allowance,
dearness allowance, childcare
subsidy, housing subsidy, and
more
capitalism, and politicization of public personnel from the elite strata to the lower
and middle strata of the street-level bureaucracy.
While there is an overt effort to capture efficiency in administrative processes, the
quality and management of the public servants performing these processes are
13
Purpose the data serves
Survey data can provide insights
into public servant’s professional
and personal work-life needs and
improve employee support and
retention efforts by government
agencies
Longitudinal data can help
aggregate patterns in public
servant’s professional growth,
productivity, and turnover, thereby
informing government’s personnel
investment and human resource
strategies
Demographic data can provide
insights into presence or absence
of representative bureaucracy.
More specifically the scope for
creating passive representation and
providing the right managerial
support to foster active and
symbolic representation among
street-level public servants
Performance data can provide
insights into identifying gaps in
investments in human capital,
technical skills and training of
public servants to improve
organizational performance
Public servant remuneration data
can help agency leadership
improve job satisfaction, work-life
balance, performance and reduce
employee’s intention to leave
14 S. Viswanath

completely overlooked. The public sector human resources – the unseen and
unheard-of public servants – who carry out their day-to-day tasks do not receive
attention. Given the vastness of the central and state government departments and the
services they provide, the existence of skilled and motivated public sector employees
is as important as the existence of skilled and motivated civil servants. India’s
obsession with the elite cadre of civil servants is only an echo of India’s colonial
history. Bureaucratic effectiveness cannot be wholly equated to effectiveness of the
IAS officers. Bertrand et al. (2015) while studying bureaucratic effectiveness argue
that:

Bureaucrats are a core element of state capacity. They are responsible for implementing
policy and therefore have a critical bearing on societal outcomes. Bureaucratic effectiveness
is particularly important in developing economies. Indeed, many emerging countries have
recently adopted social and economic reform programs that are aimed at promoting struc-
tural change and that have the potential to substantially raise living standards. The eventual
success or failure of these programs centrally depends on how they will be implemented in
the field. Bureaucrats play a key role in this process. (p. 2)

Indian bureaucracy, a lingering product of the British colonial administration, is

ill famed as being corrupt and stifling (Political and Economic Risk Consultancy
2018). Efforts to study the performance of India’s bureaucracy are often solely
concentrated on the performance of the exclusive cadre of civil servants and their
oversight in program implementation. The weak local state capacity is often linked
to lack of political incentives to invest and underfunded bureaucrats who are unable
to allocate time to managerial tasks to successfully implement government programs
(Dasgupta and Kapur 2017). While Dasgupta and Kapur (2017) are a new generation
of political scientists studying the complex linkages between Indian political econ-
omy and bureaucratic behavior, we also need public administration scholars scien-
tifically studying the managing of public sector human resources as an approach
separate from the political settings and the lingering narratives of rent-seeking and
fiefdoms within the civil service.

Conclusion

The two major theoretical frames raised in this chapter are public personnel ethics
and representative bureaucracy. Each is tied to the idea of increasing public trust in
the government, which is currently rooted in the IAS, a holdover from the British
empire, and therefore lacking a real social contract with citizenry. The goal of
systematically identifying and empowering public servants is to both achieve repre-
sentative bureaucracy and inform a personnel system of ethics which can ultimately
strengthen the social contract between street level bureaucrats and citizens in India.
There are larger national-level initiatives towards transparency and accountabil-
ity. For instance, the national performance dashboard (https://transformingindia.
mygov.in/) provides publicly accessible program analytics and indicators and the
Open Government Data (https://data.gov.in/) platform in collaboration with the
Public Servants in Modern India: Who Are They? 15

National Informatics Center (NIC) and the Ministry of Electronics & Information
Technology hosts about 404,244 freely downloadable government resources. Fur-
thering these efforts in creating accountability, public servants who are administering
government program at the grassroots have to be the focal point of public sector
human resource management initiatives. The first step in doing so is collecting data
on public servants and making that data publicly accessible. Being aware of the
trends in public sector employment will allow for public administration researchers
and policy makers to ask bigger questions regarding training and competency of
public servants; increasing productivity levels of public servants; identifying the
need for equitable work-life programs for public servants; diversity creation and
management at all levels of the bureaucracy and retention or reorganization of talent.
Practitioners and scholars of Indian public administration should resuscitate the
significance of the public sector employee at the grassroots. This is not only
important for improving quality of public sector workforce and but, also to continue
restoring public confidence in government workers and citizen satisfaction with
public service. Home to 1.353 billion citizens, the Republic of India is the world’s
largest democracy. To continue governing the people democratically and to be able
to deliver public goods and services that have equitable outcomes that efficiently
provide returns on public resources and are equally accessible, the country needs to
recruit and retain not only the best civil servants but also the best public servants.

Cross-References

▶ Contemporary Issues in Civil Service Management in South Asia: Principles and

Practice in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh
▶ Trajectories of Reform: Where (and Who) Are the Public Servants?

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