Now, right person for right job, no more lobbying for PS, OSD posts: report

New Delhi : Lobbying for the posts of private secretaries and officers on special duty to Union ministers had been eliminated and senior appointments were now dictated by the mantra of “right person for the right job”, the personnel ministry has said.

Merit and integrity were the keys to appointments in the Modi government, the ministry said in a report. Speculations related to transfers and postings in the higher levels of government had been checked with IT being used to bring in transparency in the system, it added.

A multi-source stakeholder feedback, also known as 360-degree approach, was being followed for selecting officers for senior level appointments, the ministry said in a booklet titled, “3 years of sustained HR initiatives: Foundation for a New India”, released in a function attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently.

The deciding factor for postings was “right person for the right job”. This had led to placements becoming more representative, with 120 non-IAS officers from services like the Indian Police Service, Indian Forest Service, Indian Revenue Service and Indian Audit and Accounts Service currently placed as joint secretaries, it said. The total number of joint secretaries is 291.

The high number is significant as civil services have been demanding career opportunities equal to those enjoyed by the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), considered the backbone of the bureaucracy.
Earlier, for empanelment to the posts of joint secretary and above, an experts’ panel would scrutinise the marks of the annual performance appraisal reports of the officer for the past 10 years and aggregate the scores for every year.

This led to a situation where most officers were graded as outstanding without any differentiation on the basis of specific aspects of their performance and character, the ministry said. “Now, a robust system has been instituted which weeds out officers with an ambiguous record. This has been institutionalised by implementing a system of obtaining multi-source stakeholder feedback by the expert panel of officers under consideration for empanelment,” it said.

The ministry said care had taken to ensure that the feedback was sufficiently broad-based to avoid any possibility of individual prejudices materially affecting the final assessment. The changes in the empanelment process have not been limited to the central staffing scheme. For central deputations, even Inspector General empanelment for Indian Police Service officers has now been aligned with the more rigorous joint secretary empanelment procedure, it said.

“Similarly, the scope for lobbying associated with the posting of PSs and OSDs to ministers has been eliminated. The focus on merit, integrity and objectivity in senior placements has ushered in better work culture,” the ministry said. The government has laid out reforms to ensure merit, objectivity and probity in senior appointments, it said.

“Realising that the efforts would come to a nought without the instant flow of information to support it, systems have been institutionalised to provide for on-demand real-time dissemination of information to all stakeholders,” the ministry said.

An online application — Employees Online — launched by the government has introduced unprecedented transparency in the system and has eliminated speculations on transfers and postings in senior echelons of the government. “It has also eliminated the potential for corruption arising out of information asymmetry,” the ministry said.