Examine Your Own Conscience

Recently, a picture got viral and proliferated on almost every social media platform showing a bearded man with two guards alongside, with words stating “ Neither did he passed CSS nor did he topped PCS, directly assumed the charge of a DC “. In the wake of the Taliban’s unabated subjugation of Afghanistan, such pictures are the normal sights to be seen. 

     This put me to question: What is exactly the parameter to run the bureaucratic machinery in a country?. The aforementioned exams are the top entrance exams of civil services in Pakistan. The ratio of passing is 0.5 to 0.7 every year, with the graduates of top-notch foreign universities and fancy degrees vying. 

Why bother writing lengthy and extensive essays along with fluency in English when all you have to do is sealing shops, charging vendors, and conduct cleanliness drives?. 

     

       Why bother cramming 12 papers including European and US history, when everything comes down to a thing or two: Administrative acumen and Maintaining the writ-of-the-state. 

           I think civil services would be managed way better in the flagship of a Taliban DC than in Pakistan. Needless to say, he would be far more independent in decision-making, given the support of the Emirate than a studious Deputy Commissioner in Pakistan who has to look over his shoulders, especially if a case concerned criminals wearing “boots”. 

Subsequently, the guy has more geographic know-how of the districts they are pertained to. Also, most of the local cooperation will render the services easily, if not all. 

       ICS, CSS, and UPSC are colonial relics. Nowhere in the world does the bureaucracy comprises such ‘short-cuts’, when it comes to induction. People with medical backgrounds are running customs and police etc. Engineers in administration while business grads in foreign services put a whole lot of mess in an already chaotic system. 

                   Chief secretaries and Deputy Commissioners of important districts are of PAS, which is a federal body that means they are only answerable to Islamabad; this shuns all the issues of theirs relevant provinces. Administrative federalism has been a dragged-out discourse in Pakistan but in vain. 

     So, before we judge the educational capabilities of others, we ought not to forget the loopholes in our system.