Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been pushing for overhauling the Indian bureaucracy which, many of his advisers felt, still suffered from colonial hangover and was influenced by the Leftist ideology. After allowing lateral entry into the elite civil services, the government has decided to launch a massive capacity building programme for the 46 lakh strong central government employees so that they “remain entrenched in Indian culture and sensibilities and remain connected with their roots.”
The programme approved by the Union cabinet on Wednesday will be called Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building (NPCSCB), also termed as Mission Karamyogi for wider appeal. Union minister Prakash Javadekar said it was one of the major steps to be undertaken by the government to reform the civil services.
“Mission Karmayogi aims to prepare the Indian Civil Servant for the future by making him more creative, constructive, imaginative, innovative, proactive, professional, progressive, energetic, enabling, transparent and technology-enabled. Empowered with specific role-competencies, the civil servant will be able to ensure efficient service delivery of the highest quality standards,” an official note said.
The programme is backed with a proper institutional framework to include Prime Minister's Public Human Resources (HR) Council, Capacity Building Commission, a special purpose vehicle for owning and operating the digital assets and the technological platform for online training, and a Coordination Unit headed by the Cabinet Secretary. This elaborate institutional framework will guide the training programmes for the civil servants.
The public human resources council to be headed by the PM would comprise of select Union ministers, chief ministers, eminent public HR practitioners, thinkers, global thought leaders and public service functionaries.
Under this system, the programme will be delivered by setting up an Integrated Government Online Training-iGOTKarmayogi platform.
The core guiding principles of the programme include: Making a transition from ‘rules based’ to ‘roles based’ HR management, aligning work allocation of civil servants by matching their competencies to the requirements of the post; 'on-site learning' to complement the ‘off-site’ learning; to make available to all civil servants an opportunity to continuously build and strengthen their behavioral, functional and domain competencies in their self-driven and mandated learning path,” minister of state Jitendra Singh said.
From the institutional framework, the Capacity Building Commission will ensure a uniform approach in managing and regulating the capacity building ecosystem on collaborative and co-sharing basis. This commission will help PM Public Human Resources Council in approving the annual capacity building plans and to exercise functional supervision over all Central Training Institutions dealing with civil services capacity building.
This commission will also create shared learning resources, including internal and external faculty and resource centers, make recommendations on standardization of training and capacity building, pedagogy and methodology and set norms for common mid-career training programmes across all civil services.
Earlier the government had decided to replace the existing regulatory bodies in the higher education sector with new structures to do away with old bodies like the UGC and AICTE. Similarly this new commission will take over and decide on the training mechanism of the civil servants.
According to the officials, the digital iGOT-Karmayogi platform brings the scale and state-of-the-art infrastructure to augment the capacities of over two crore officials in India. “The platform is expected to evolve into a vibrant and world-class market place for content where carefully curated and vetted digital e-learning material will be made available. Besides capacity building, service matters like confirmation after probation period, deployment, work assignment and notification of vacancies etc. would eventually be integrated with the proposed competency framework.”
The new programme will entail financial cost. To cover around 46 lakh Central employees, a sum of Rs 510.86 crore will be spent over a period of five years from 2020-21 to 2024-25. The expenditure is partly funded by multilateral assistance to the tune of USD 50 million. A wholly owned Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) for NPCSCB will be set up under Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013. The SPV will be a "not-for-profit" company and will own and manage iGOT-Karmayogi platform by creating and operationalize the content.