Government's New Scorecard System for Civil Servants Sparks Debate on Bureaucratic Role
The Cabinet Secretariat has introduced performance scorecards for Union secretaries, marking a significant shift in how senior civil servants at the Centre are evaluated. This development, first reported by The Indian Express on February 9, represents a major departure from traditional assessment methods.
What the Scorecards Measure
The new evaluation system covers approximately a dozen parameters that rely heavily on quantifiable indicators. These include file disposal rates, reduction of pendency, expenditure control, and output delivery. The system incorporates negative marks for lapses while allowing the cabinet secretary some discretionary authority in awarding final scores.
Currently, about 100 secretaries serve in the Government of India, with roughly 80 coming from the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). The remaining secretaries represent diverse backgrounds including the Indian Foreign Service, other central services, and specialists like engineers, scientists, and economists.
What the Scorecards Overlook
The most striking aspect of these scorecards is not what they measure, but what they omit. Critics argue that the evaluation parameters fail to recognize the secretary's crucial role in policy formulation and 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. These responsibilities represent the hallmark of a permanent civil service in a parliamentary system, yet none of the scorecard parameters seem to acknowledge them.
Historical Purpose of Civil Services
The All-India Services—the IAS, Indian Police Service (IPS), and Indian Forest Service (IFoS)—were not conceived as mere delivery mechanisms. Under Article 312 of the Constitution, Parliament created these services not to maximize file-processing efficiency, but to enable officers to think nationally, act impartially, and hold together India's complex federal polity.
The scorecard system omits a secretary's answerability for giving impactful policy advice and critically advising on the progress and impact of projects and programs. If the principal responsibility of secretaries becomes confined to rapid and compliant implementation, it could have serious consequences for governance.
Four Major Concerns with the New System
First, simplistic marking systems risk eroding 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 in India have survived precisely because administrators adapted them over time, drawing on experience and prompt intervention. This represents the bureaucratic kernel embedded in any parliamentary system.
Second, there's 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 external advisory structures, political units, or think tanks, senior civil servants may learn that their safest role is to step back from questioning and focus instead on meeting timelines and targets. This could cause regression in the very purpose for which the civil services were created.
Third, a system that rewards speed over scrutiny and compliance over counsel is unlikely to let inconvenient truths surface before problems emerge. A competent bureaucracy is expected to play a preventive role, ensuring that flawed proposals are changed, deferred, or quietly abandoned before public announcement. When policies are centrally announced or shaped top-down, they leave no scope for in-house redesign. Treating this function as dispensable sacrifices one of the state's most valuable safeguards.
Fourth, devaluing the secretary's role devalues the entire edifice of governance. By making the top echelon of the bureaucracy irrelevant, the system dismisses the Union Public Service Commission's role in recruitment and the substantial investments made in training senior officers to provide elevated and continuous support to governments.
Corporate-Style KPIs vs. Bureaucratic Duties
The scorecard adopts a corporate style of prescribing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that privilege speed, output, and efficiency—primarily to promote business growth. However, the Union secretary has a duty not merely to accelerate decisions and their outcomes, but to interrogate them thoroughly.
Systems do not fail for want of speed, but when judgment and dissent are treated as obstacles rather than essential duties. This perspective highlights the fundamental tension between corporate-style efficiency metrics and the nuanced responsibilities of public administration in a democratic system.
Accountability Mechanisms Already Exist
None of these criticisms suggest that outcomes don't matter or that senior officers should escape accountability. Without question, senior officers must be held accountable, but this responsibility already falls to institutional watchdogs like the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG), Central Vigilance Commission (CVC), Public Accounts Committee, and Estimates Committee.
The current debate centers on whether the new scorecard system adequately captures the full spectrum of a senior civil servant's responsibilities in India's parliamentary democracy, or whether it risks reducing complex governance functions to simplistic, quantifiable metrics that may undermine the very foundations of the bureaucratic system.
