Government to come up with a better system to appraise the performance of bureaucrats.

NEW DELHI: The government has decided to go after slack bureaucrats, with Cabinet Secretary Ajit Seth promising a review of the performance appraisal system and Personnel Secretary PK Mishra advocating a system that ensures lesser salary for incompetent babus. In candid comments made to a gathering of the country’s top bureaucrats at the weekend, Seth said: “The feedback to the performance appraisal system is mixed. Everyone is getting near perfect scores. If everyone is outstanding, then no one is. We will come up with a better system to appraise the performance of bureaucrats.”

Several corporate luminaries have blasted India’s bureaucracy in recent months for being obstructionist and unimaginative. The global CEO of Britain’s Vodafone Group Plc, Vittorio Colao, in a media interview last February said India’s bureaucracy was “damaging” to the country. “I think the government is making a good effort to try to change this, but cannot continue with a bureaucracy that wakes up in the morning and decides to give another interpretation of something,” he said.

Former Cabinet Secretary Naresh Chandra, who was a keynote speaker at the weekend conference, echoed said the feeling overseas was that India’s bureaucracy is impeding its economic growth. He said against such a context if 90% of the bureaucrats were termed outstanding in their appraisals, then “we are prisoners of our own systems”.

ET had reported on April 13 that unlike the corporate sector, the government’s Annual Performance Assessment Report ( APAR) system was structured such that every bureaucrat scored 9 out of 10. Unlike in most professionally-run organisations, the appraisal system does not require the appraisee to meet the appraiser face-to-face, ensuring that the pay packet of a vast majority of officials is largely untouched and delinked with performance.