Civil Services Commands Respect Due to Unbiased, Neutral Decision Making

The All India Civil Services
has always commanded considerable respect from the citizens because of its
neutral and unbiased decision making process, according to V Srinivas, IAS,
Additional Secretary, Ministry of Personnel, PG and Pensions, Govt of India.
He was delivering a workshop on Ethics and Accountability in Governance
organised by the Indian School of Public Policy, New Delhi. The respect and
faith in Civil Services help them carry out their duties to enable the nation
to achieve the objectives outlined in the Preamble of the Constitution.
He emphasised the need for high
moral standards in the domain of governance: “The system of Government that we
have adopted postulates the necessity of high moral standards in both the
Government and the Administration. The Parliamentary system of Government
cannot be effective unless the standard of morality of those who work is high
and the general public believes that it is so. You can hire skills, but
leadership and faith in fairness and impartiality cannot be outsourced.”
During his session, Mr.
Srinivas discussed a number of topics covering the following sub-aspects:
Improving the Quality of Public Service Delivery, Constitutional Provisions –
“The Services”, The All India Services (Conduct) Rules 1968, Focus on
Preventive Vigilance, Strengthening Audit and Accounting processes, Future
Policy Challenges, among many others.
On the subject of corruption he
added: “India’s “zero tolerance to corruption” approach, as well as “minimum
government and maximum governance” approach has resulted in simplification of
the governance model in recent years. Some of the steps taken include abolition
of the system of attestation/authentication by Government servants for
submission of certificates, abolition of personal interviews for recruitments
to lower level posts and weeding-out of inefficient public servants and those
of doubtful integrity above the age of 50 years, prematurely. A special
investigation team has also been constituted to fight black money. The Government
conducted online auctions of coal blocks, and sought international cooperation
in G-20 meetings on ending tax havens in Europe and other countries. In
bilateral meetings with Swiss authorities, India has said that combating the
menace of black money and tax evasion was a "shared priority" for
both the countries. My own approach to fighting corruption in my three decades
in Government service has been enhanced supervision, increased transparency,
greater stakeholder engagement and severe penalties with time bound completion
of disciplinary proceedings. I always felt that prevention of corruption should
be based on credible deterrence and strong audit and accounting mechanisms.
Further, robust oversight and monitoring always send a strong message to potential
wrongdoers.”
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