Reforming Administrative System
Depoliticisation Essential

By Khilendra Basnyat

THE government machinery has touched almost every sector of life in Nepal. Overtime the size of the civil service has increased manifold compared to its initial days in 1956.

Despite repeated efforts to modernise the old system, our public administration system in a blend of both traditionalism and modernity.

Past experiences have shown that several government programmes could not yield desired benefits to the people on account of poor implementation aspect.

The acts of open defiance with impunity of the country’s rules and regulations by organised groups, associations and even institutions depict the miserable conditions of the government. The authority of the elected government is eroding, and everybody hardly believes the government any more.

The ad hoc decisions and actions regarding matters of great national importance have alleviated the faith of the government to an all time low in the nation’s history.

The feeling of our man rather than experienced and efficient persons in the concerned spheres seems to have developed among the political decision-makers. Consequently, the utilisation of the experience and talent of civil servants toward active party politics is inconsistent with the rule of civil servants in the parliament system of governance.

Since the bureaucracy is the vehicle to implement the decision and programmes of the government, it has emphasised on administrative and institutional reforms to render people better and efficient services. However, the significant role of the government in addition to its regulatory functions still remains.

In fact, our bureaucracy is overstaffed because of the tendency of the political officials to create new posts in order to accommodate their friends and relatives and empire building attributes of the bureaucrat. Actually, the restructing exercising of/for civil service is essential to make it efficient and effective.

After the restoration of democracy, politicisation has led an adverse impact on the administration system of our country. For example, the trend of appointing political figures to head the public corporations has caused an unfair impact in the minds of the officials of the respective corporations. In the past, leadership in these corporations kept changing with the change of government.

The present low performance of corporations is attributable to factors such as conflicting corporate culture characterised by corrupt, unethical behaviours and indifferent attitudes towards both services and productivity improvement. It has been observed that an incompetent chief executive is one of the chief factors responsible for the low corporate performance.

The government should not think that the performance of public corporations can be revamped simply by changing the chief executive or chairman. However, it should comprehend well that many managers of these corporations have reached senior positions by completing minimum years of service for promotion and lack the type of vision, professional cometency, dynamism, creativity and feeling of ownership.

As a citizen of an open society with a multi-party system, a civil servant can cast his/her vote in the election. However as a civil servant paid from the public coffer, his/her main duty is to provide service to the public without any discrimination. In other words, a civil servant should be committed to fulfilling the policy of the government, keeping away from politics.

No doubt, the civil servants also played a vital role in the popular movement of 1990. After the restoration of democracy, they are mainly divided into two groups such as the Civil Service Organisation and the Civil Service Association which are both the sympathisers of the main political parties.

Although the government has decided it illegal for officers to become members of either of the associations, this has not proved to be effective. Actually, the civil service is divided into groups. This happens because the civil servants have wished so and politicians preferred it. Aside from this, the so-called politicians protect, encourage and use them to meet their needs.

Until now a number of commissions were formed by the government in order to bring about administrative reforms. However, the goal of overall development is still a problem.

Administration, which is also a natural corollary of the doctrine of development, has been acclaimed as an ideal of the present age. Reformers of administration are never tired of proclaiming their faith on democracy. However, the emphasis of the managerial turn in public administration is likely to be away from widening the area of democratic participation. Untidy political negotiations are observed as a possible source of corrutpion and a diversion of economic rationally.

In order to streamline public administration, reformers, advocate the incorporation, wherever possible, of some of the values and techniques of corporate management, the profitability criterion, cost-benefit analysis and economic rationally. In reality, the emphasis is not so much on achieving an egalitarian society but on developing individual capacities.

Time and again, one encounters with criticism that it is possible to carry on administration by keeping it always within the purview of law, more so in case of a developing country determined to make steady progress.

In our country, what is desirable is to have a civil service, which is neutral to party politics but committed to government policies, democratic values and the norms inherent in the constitution of the kingdom of Nepal of 1990. If this were not the case, the problem of natural confidence between the government and civil servants would always remain.

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