BUREAUCRACY, or the administration, is meant to provide services to the masses, resolve public issues by utilising legal authority, and remain in the forefront while managing different calamities, including the Covid pandemic, to safeguard citizens from its adverse impacts through intervention and awareness.

It is termed an institution or a set of institutions that is budgeted by the government, and its employees are paid by the government through taxes paid by the people. In other words, a person who works to achieve government objectives is part of the bureaucracy.

American political scientist Luther Gulick in Notes on the Theory of Organisation coined POSDCORB, which stands for ‘planning, organising, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting’, to indicate the spectrum of bureaucratic functions.

Pakistan has been keen to bring reforms in the bureaucracy for the last many years. As far as the need is concerned, the bureaucracy needed to be reformed right at the beginning, in 1947, when the country appeared on the map of the world as a sovereign state.

While the world has adopted new ways of serving people on the basis of their taxes, Pakistan has still been following the old Rules of Business 1973 of the bureaucracy. Why the bureaucracy is not coming out of that approach? Is it worthwhile for the country? Or is the country reluctant to adopt change that is able to benefit people at large, and is the need of the day?

According to the International Crisis Group’s report, Civil Service Reforms in Pakistan, many years of misconduct, political manipulation and corruption have reduced Pakistan’s civil service to being incapable of providing effective authority and basic public services.

The need is to reform the bureaucracy. The reforms should be innovative, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound.

The administration teams should be given handsome salaries and pension plans that must keep them away from the temptation of taking the wrong path to success. The use of information technology (IT) should be adopted to avoid the huge piles of record files, and an innovative office management system should be introduced in the bureaucracy.

The hierarchical method of authority should be reduced to the number of not more than two authority holders in order to facilitate the public in getting the work done.

Capacity-building programmes, both nationally and internationally, should be offered by the government to the bureaucrats to help them learn the state-of-the-art mode of serving the people while in public office. Moreover, the government should alter the annual confidential reports (ACRs) to comprise tangible, performance-oriented criteria instead of subjective evaluations of officers’ characters.

If the reformed bureaucracy goes the right way, most public issues will be resolved and no problem would be left unaddressed.

Furqan Hyder Shaikh
Jamshoro

Published in Dawn, September 6th, 2021