The Indian Express reported on February 9 that the Cabinet Secretariat has begun using performance scorecards for Union secretaries. This marks a major change in the evaluation process for senior civil servants at the Centre. The scorecard covers a dozen parameters and relies on quantifiable indicators such as file disposal rates, reduction of pendency, expenditure control, and output delivery. Negative marks penalise lapses, while the cabinet secretary keeps a small discretionary part while awarding marks.
What is striking is not what these scorecards measure, but what they omit. At present, about 100 secretaries serve in the Government of India, with some 80 from the IAS. Those from non-IAS backgrounds — the Indian Foreign Service, other central services, engineers, scientists, economists — are, like IAS secretaries, involved in policy formulation and offering strategic guidance to ministers. No less important is a secretary’s ability to anticipate consequences by ensuring proposals are administratively workable, fiscally sustainable, and politically viable. None of the parameters seem to recognise these responsibilities — the hallmark of a permanent civil service in a parliamentary system.
The All-India Services — the IAS, IPS, and IFoS (forests) — were not conceived as delivery mechanisms. Under Article 312, Parliament and the law created these services not to maximise file-processing efficiency, but to enable officers to think nationally, act impartially, and hold together a complex federal polity. The scorecard omits a secretary’s answerability for giving impactful policy advice and critically advising on the progress and impact of projects and programmes. If the principal responsibility of secretaries gets confined to rapid and compliant implementation, it can have sombre consequences.
First, simplistic marking systems erode institutional memory. When every initiative is treated as a discrete project rather than part of a longer administrative continuum, institutional memory becomes dispensable. Policies that have endured for decades have survived because administrators adapted them over time, drawing on experience and prompt intervention. That is the bureaucratic kernel in any parliamentary system.
Second, there is an implied assumption that policy design may have moved elsewhere. If thinking and direction emanate not from the constitutionally and statutorily established bureaucracies but from elsewhere — external advisory structures, political units, think tanks — senior civil servants quickly learn that their safest role is to step back from questioning and focus on meeting timelines and targets. The purpose for which the civil services were created could regress. The outcomes will weaken the foundation of the bureaucracy. Unless that is intentional.
Third, a system that rewards speed over scrutiny and compliance over counsel is unlikely to let inconvenient truths surface before things go awry. A competent bureaucracy is expected to play a preventive role to see that flawed proposals are changed, deferred, or quietly abandoned. This obviates the need for subsequent public withdrawal. When policies are centrally announced, or shaped top-down, they leave no scope to redesign things in-house. Treating this function as dispensable sacrifices one of the state’s most valuable safeguards.
Fourth, devaluing the secretary devalues the entire edifice of governance. By making the top echelon of the bureaucracy irrelevant, it dismisses the UPSC’s role in recruitment and the investments made in training senior officers to provide elevated and continuous support to governments.
None of this is to suggest that outcomes do not matter, or that senior officers should escape accountability. Without question, senior officers must be held accountable, but that is the responsibility of institutional watchdogs like the C&AG, CVC, Public Accounts Committee, and the Estimates Committee.
The scorecard adopts a corporate style of prescribing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which privilege speed, output, and efficiency but only to promote business growth. The Union secretary instead has a duty not merely to accelerate decisions and their outcomes, but to interrogate them.
Systems do not fail for want of speed, but when judgement and dissent are treated as obstacles, not duties.
The writer is former chief secretary, Delhi, and former secretary, Ministry of Health
