Annual confidential reports, with the passage of time, are no longer annual or confidential, or true evaluation reports. A number of All-India officers find their annual reports recorded after a delay of years and years while the service and political superiors sit over them to hold extra-legal strings vis-à-vis the officer reported upon. Confidential they are certainly not, as nothing is confidential in the Government any longer. The contents of the reports are known to the officers concerned even before the ink dries. There is an unusual sight of officers expressing gratitude for recording flattering remarks about them, while there are others who prick pins as a backlash of their not having been evaluated according to their bloated self-esteem. Subjectivity has substituted the much called for objectivity. Considerations such as meek submission, of religion, caste and creed do ominously erupt and show their ugly face in the annual confidential reports. Personal ‘hand in glove’ affiliations tend to divide the civil servants into what can be described as modern ‘misls’, with the ‘misldars’ promoting and piloting fragmented factions of civil servants forming wheels within the wheel.
There is an imperative need to break the shackles of subjective subjugation by evolving scientific evaluation norms based on performance indices. Each one of us must shed the feudalistic legacy of licking the seniors and kicking the juniors. Each one of us must be encouraged to develop one’s own distinguished identity and grow into becoming an institution. Each one of us must not be compelled to compromise with professionalism, whatever may the consequences. By this, we can rise in social esteem by emerging a class of individually accomplished civil servants. It is only with collective individual strength that organized character assassination of the civil servants as a class can be repulsed. We should be united in our resolve to collectively strive for individual excellence. We must excel in efficiency parameters which is the hall-mark of leadership. Leadership can no longer be complacently sustained in the modern world just by higher pay-scales and assured promotions. There is no place for the misplaced feeling of infallibility and invincibility. We are the part of a scenario where market pays its professionals only for efficiency, while the Government maintains most of its work force as charity.
* Authored by Sarvesh Kaushal in the year 2002 and published in The Punjab IAS Officers’ Association newsletter “The Occasional File”.
