Nitipath scheme on the lines of Agnipath

Nitipath scheme on the lines of Agnipath

News: Nitin Pai (co-founder and director of the Takshashila institution) highlighted a case for the government to launch a “Nitipath' scheme on the lines of Agnipath and the Short Service Commission for military officers.

How would Nitipath scheme work?
• Officers can be filtered out after 10, 25 and 30 years of service. This would rectify the top-heavy structure, and create a culture of public service and performance.
• The government can recruit four times as many candidates at the entry level without being constrained by the number of apex level positions and career paths.
• Instead of 600-1,000 candidates appointed to the AIS, we can have 4,000 officers entering service every year. Only 25% of them will be retained after a performance review after the fourth year.

Benefits of Nitipath?
• It will bring a lot of young and energetic officers at the junior levels, give them strong incentives to perform, and give them work experience in government. The average quality of the top 4,000 all-India rank holders will not be markedly different from that of the top 1,000. So, a four-year review period will allow the government to get a better pick than merely exam and interview scores.
• Those who leave government service after four years will have good economic prospects. It is quite likely many will voluntarily choose to leave and opt for higher studies or private employment. The addition of such youthful, trained and experienced managerial cadre will benefit the broader economy.
• Instituting performance reviews and exit filters every five years will create a path towards a semi- structural reform of India’s administrative machinery.
• A lateral entry scheme can accommodate the re-entry of people who might have been filtered out at junior levels but have distinguished themselves since.

What are the government initiatives for Civil services reforms?
• Provision of Lateral Entry - Lateral entry means when personnel from the private sector are selected to an administrative post of the government despite them not being selected in or being part of a bureaucratic setup. It helps because contemporary times require highly skilled and motivated individuals at the helm of administrative affairs, without which public service delivery mechanisms do not work smoothly.
• Citizens Charters - Government has mandated Citizen Charters for all Ministries/Departments which are updated and reviewed on a regular basis.
• Mission Karmayogi - It is a National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building (NPCSCB). It is a comprehensive reform of the capacity building apparatus at individual, institutional and process levels for efficient public service delivery.
• Centralized Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System (CPGRAMS) - It is an online web- enabled system which provides the facility to lodge a grievance online from any geographical location. It enables the citizen to track online the grievance being followed up with Departments concerned and also enables DARPG to monitor the grievance.