Parliament is now weighing the Civil Service Bill, 2006. Among its most prominent features is automatic promotion of civil servants after they have spent a certain number of years in service. If this Bill is passed, nearly 32,000 civil servants will be automatically promoted, slaughtering the concept of merit-based reward system. This provision applies to employees from non-gazetted second class to section officers who have put in sixteen years of service provided they have the academic credentials necessary for the next higher level. But even those employees who do not meet this academic criterion will be entitled to automatic promotion if their service count works out to twenty years. The government contends that the proposed provision is aimed at making the promotion system ‘more equitable’.

The purpose of the government hiring employees is to provide services to the public in the best possible manner. As long as that function is performed, at least reasonably well, the use of the public purse to foot the huge bills of the salaries and other perks can be justified. But no canon of good governance or principle of human resource management can justify retaining, far less rewarding, dead woods. Promotion should, by definition, be awarded to only those who have performed their duties particularly well. Automatic promotion will include promotion of even those employees who should in fact be dismissed from service for poor performance. To persist with the view that a promotion system unrelated to merit would be more equitable is almost equivalent to saying that good governance is not the goal of the SPA constituents. Already, the failure to institute a system that rewards good performance and punish the non-performers in various ways, including even their dismissal, has had to do much with the abysmally poor service delivery of the government agencies.

The chairman and members of the Public Service Commission (PSC) were dead right in expressing serious reservations about the Bill in the State Affairs Committee (SAC) on November 30, preferring the Civil Service Act 1992 to the unchanged version of the present Bill. Describing the proposed promotion system as unscientific, they were of the view that the PSC should be shut down if this Bill were to be passed. Assuming for a moment the equitability syndrome, one wonders why the government is unwilling to apply its ‘principle of equity’ to undersecretaries and above. Several government secretaries have also told SAC that a merit-based promotion system should be adopted, as the proposed system would make the bureaucracy weak and unstable. Of concern also is the undue pressure the employees’ unions affiliated to SPA constituents are putting for the passage of the Bill. To make the bureaucracy neutral and more responsive to the people’s needs, it is also necessary to ensure that the right to form unions does not interfere with the objectives of the civil service in a democratic society.