The country is abuzz with arguments for and against creating new provinces as part of far-reaching administrative reforms. Legally, creating new federating units requires a constitutional amendment, including the consent of the provincial assembly concerned. Politically, it entails a broad consensus among major political parties.
Financially, adding to the number of provinces will ratchet up administrative expenditure, as each new federating unit will have an enormous executive, legislative and, possibly, judicial machinery, at a time when slashing the fiscal deficit is high on the government’s agenda.
Without prejudice to the case for or against creating new provinces, one may argue in favour of first undertaking civil service reforms. These reforms will require neither an amendment to the constitution – only the Civil Servants Act, 1973 will have to be amended by a simple parliamentary majority – nor a broad political consensus. Nor will these reforms tax the public exchequer. Administrative reforms will be of little avail if they do not include retooling the country’s civil service, the linchpin of the administrative machinery.
In Pakistan, the last, and to date the most comprehensive, exercise to reform the civil service was undertaken by the Musharraf regime via the Devolution Plan 2001. As part of the plan, the regime abolished two of the most powerful but most regressive components of the colonial legacy. These included the executive magistracy and the office of the deputy commissioner (DC).
In the entire civil service hierarchy, the DC office was unique. He/she was the chief revenue officer (or collector) in the district, responsible for maintaining law and order; the district police officer answered to him/her, and he/she coordinated among various government departments. To top it all, the DC was the chief magistrate (or district magistrate) in criminal matters. As such, the DC was an executive officer exercising judicial authority, with a reach as far as awarding an accused life imprisonment. It was a travesty of the constitutionally mandated principle of judicial independence.
The combination of administrative, revenue, police and judicial authority in one office was reminiscent of colonialism. If you ask any retired officer of the Pakistan Administrative Service (PAS) about the most memorable phase of their illustrious career, in ten out of ten cases, the answer would be their time as DC. In ‘Shahhabnama’, easily the most well-known autobiography of a civil servant, more pages are devoted to the author’s tenure as DC than to any other part of his mouth-watering career, which saw him serve as secretary to three mighty rulers, namely governor-general Ghulam Muhammad, president Iskandar Mirza and General Ayub Khan
The Devolution Plan transferred the DC’s judicial powers to where they belonged – the judiciary – renamed the office as the district coordination officer (DCO) and took away many of its other powers. Most of these were given to the district nazim, who was the elected head of the district government. This single move not only enhanced local autonomy but also gave the people’s representatives greater control over the civil service. That’s how democracy is meant to work and actually works in several countries.
Be that as it may, once the 2008 national elections brought politicians back to the helm, one of the first things they did in all four provinces was to roll back the Devolution Plan and revive the DC office with all its previous glory sans district magistracy. The latter was spared because of a likely backlash from the judiciary. Other than that, things were back to square one.
Some two years before his fall, Musharraf had constituted a National Commission for Government Reforms (NCGR) to suggest measures to retool the civil service at the federal and provincial levels. The NCGR came out with a sweeping set of recommendations, whose crux was to put in place a specialised bureaucracy, especially for economic management.
Since 1973, the federal bureaucracy has comprised 13 occupational groups or services. The purpose is to have a specialised civil service capable of grappling with the challenges of an increasingly complex and rapidly changing environment. But the specialisation principle works only up to the middle-management level. Beyond that, it gives way to the principle of administrative efficiency, which dates back to the Indian Civil Service (ICS) in British India.
In essence, the principle holds that governance is a matter of general administrative skills rather than specialised knowledge. Therefore, a member of the administrative service is deemed competent enough to handle the most intricate of situations and sort out the thorniest of issues, even if they do not possess the relevant qualifications.
While Britain itself has come a long way from this once cherished principle, Pakistan has retained its creed.
On the strength of the principle of administrative efficiency, PAS officers are deemed thoroughly capable of spearheading any activity associated with governance: finalising deals with foreign donors, spearheading the country in trade negotiations, handling the security situation, maintaining law and order, leading budget preparations, drawing up fiscal policy, meeting revenue targets, supervising infrastructure-related projects, steering human capital development and whatnot.
Just imagine a PAS officer with little expertise in the economy or finance negotiating a credit agreement with the IMF or hammering out a trade treaty with China, the US or the European Union, where negotiators are highly specialised and competent. The outcome is not difficult to predict. In the 1990s, Pakistan struck two back-to-back credit agreements with the IMF, which led to a premature industrialisation we are yet to recover from. The deals were certainly not astutely negotiated on our side. The same goes for the trade treaties with other countries, almost all of which have left Pakistan worse off in terms of trade balance.
Alive to such shortcomings, the NCGR called for putting in place an Economic Management Group (EMG) to fill in senior-level (BS 20-22) vacancies in economic ministries and departments in the federal and provincial governments, respectively. The EMG officers would be recruited through the Federal Public Service Commission (FPSC) on the basis of their strong expertise in economic disciplines, such as finance, trade and development. Professionals from the private sector and NGOs would also be eligible to compete for those positions. In this way, the capacity gaps in senior bureaucracy would be bridged.
Alas, it was not to be. The NCGR presented its report just a few months before Musharraf’s departure. His successors at the helm consigned the recommendations to the dustbin and decided that it should be business as usual. As a result, the civil service in Pakistan continues to be generalised, governed by the globally obsolete, but in our case highly revered, principle of administrative efficiency. The result is before us. One need only look at our international rankings on key economic indicators such as exports, FDI, tax-to-GDP ratio, per capita income, poverty level and human capital development. Remember the classic definition of insanity: doing the same things repeatedly and expecting a different result.
Let the process of long-term administrative reforms commence with a shift from a generalised to a specialised civil service, especially for economic governance, by discarding the administrative efficiency principle. The NCGR recommendations may well be a starting point to help us reach the low-hanging fruit of civil service reforms.
The writer is an Islamabad-based columnist. He tweets/posts @hussainhzaidi and can be reached at: [email protected]
Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed in this piece are the writer’s own and don’t necessarily reflect Geo.tv’s editorial policy.
Originally published in The News
2026-09-25 09:36:00
