Kelkar blueprint to upgrade IES officers' skills

NEW DELHI: Economics used to be called the dismal science, a point well understood by the small army of government economists whose hard toil in policymaking is confined to the backroom and not particularly well-rewarded in the service either. Some sunshine will make its way into their professional lives if Dr Vijay Kelkar, adviser to finance minister Jaswant Singh, has his way.
Mr Kelkar has now formed a set of recommendations to restructure the Indian Economic Service (IES), after his blockbuster reports on reform of direct and indirect taxes and the less flamboyant but no less effective report on cadre-restructuring of the revenue department.
The numbers are small as the IES has sanctioned posts of just 508, but a qualitative improvement in the training of these officers could make all the difference in terms of obtaining cutting edge inputs for economic decision making in a liberalized regime, reckons the panel to review the training of IES officers chaired by Mr Kelkar.
There is a tacit admission that the present curriculum at the Institute of Economic Growth overlooks the crucial fact that the primary job of IES officers is not research but application of economic principles in policy analysis and formulation. So a greater real world-orientation needs to be provided to probationers.
The panel has made it clear that the IEG should focus only on four key areas – micro and macro economics, public economics and quantitative techniques. Case studies are to be made an integral part of the syllabus and the best faculty would be roped to teach probationers who, in turn, would be evaluated on a defined marking system. Fee to attract best talent is a non-issue, reckons the panel.
An intensive one-and-a-half-year’s training — four months at the IEG, six months at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, five and a half months for field visits and training at select institutions, two months for district attachment and two weeks for ministerial attachment — has been mooted. The National Stock Exchange, NSDL, SEBI, RBI, Infosys, JP Morgan, DSP Merill Lynch, Forward Markets Commission, Indian Institute of Foreign Trade figure, among others, in the list of select institutions.
The panel has recommended sending IES officers on deputation to regulatory bodies and reserving one post each in ED’s office of the ADB, World Bank and IMF.
This is not all. Two prestigious Anjaria fellowships could see promising officers being sent to Columbia University, Stanford University or Princeton for degree programmes. The entire tab will be picked up by the government.