Mission Karmayogi to Skill-up Civil Servants

The Union Cabinet on September,02 approved Mission Karmayogi, a skill development scheme for civil servants. The Narendra Modi government aims to build a future-ready civil service in the country through its Mission Karmayogi scheme.

Launching the scheme, Union minister Prakash Javadekar described Mission Karmayogi as the "biggest human resource development reform in the government".The Mission Karmayogi scheme will be open to all government employees for their re-skilling. They would be encouraged under the scheme to better equip themselves with their domain, and improve their functional and behavioural competencies.

The scheme will be under the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) with the Prime Minister's HR Council functioning as the apex body to provide guidance and direction to these capacity-building reforms. The council will have Chief Ministers as members.Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that Mission Karmayogi will radically improve human resource management practices in the government. "It will use scale and state of the art infrastructure to augment the capacity of civil servants," PM Modi said.In another tweet, PM Modi said that the scheme aims to prepare civil servants for the future by making them more creative, constructive and innovative through transparency and technology.

“This is the biggest human resources development reform in the government,” Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting Prakash Javadekar said while addressing the media to announce a slew of Cabinet’s decisions.The nationwide programme will also help civil servants stay abreast of the best practices across the world, Javadekar said.The programme will impart skills that will help civil servants ensure ease of living life and ease of doing business in the country, the minister said.“Mission Karmayogi aims to prepare Indian Civil Servants for the future by making them more creative, constructive, imaginative, innovative, proactive, professional, progressive, energetic, enabling, transparent and technology-enabled,” C. Chandramouli, Secretary, Department of Personnel and Training, said.

A council headed by the Prime Minister will decide on the programmes for capacity building.The council will have Chief Ministers, Union Ministers, Civil Service Officials and Experts.

Union Minister Jitendra Singh the government is also planning a capacity building department that will involve experts and global professionals. He said the mission will lay greater importance on the role of a civil servant than the rules they will have to follow.The Minister said the scheme will have two paths. In the self-driven path, officials will be able to choose their fields of interest, while in the guided path, officials will “be provided with the wherewithal to perform their jobs effectively”.The programme will lay emphasis on ‘on-site learning’ and complement “off-site learning”. It will promote e-learning, he said.The Cabinet Meeting was held on Wednesday (September 2) afternoon and was chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Javadekar said the meeting also approved three Memorandums of Understanding — between Textile Ministry and Japan for quality evaluation, between Mining Ministry and Finland, and between Renewable Energy Ministry and Denmark Governments.The Cabinet also approved bill making Kashmiri, Dogri and Hindi as official languages, besides Urdu and English, in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir. The Jammu and Kashmir Official Languages Bill, 2020 will be introduced in the Monsoon Session of Parliament, Javadekar said.

Commenting on the Cabinet decision, Union Home Minister Amit Shah posted a series of tweets using hashtag #CivilService4NewIndia. He said, "It is a landmark reform for the 21st century which will end the culture of working in silos and bring out new work culture. Goal-driven and constant training will empower and sensitize the civil servants to ensure accountability and transparency in the system."The government will set up a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), fully owned by it, for the operation of an online platform and facilitate digital learning. The total outlay for the scheme will be ₹ 510 crore for the first five years.To be launched on a subscription-based model, the SPV will charge an annual subscription fee of ₹ 431 per civil servant for the skill development programme.This new skill development programme for the babus comes a week after the Union Cabinet approved the setting up of the National Recruitment Agency (NRA) last week. Javadekar said the NRA was a pre-recruitment reform while the Mission Karmayogi scheme is a post-recruitment reform for the government servants.The scheme is aimed at improving the performance of the government employees and officers. The government said the scheme will end subjective evaluation of the employees, and ensure scientifically-devised, objective and real-time assessment of their performance.The objective of the scheme is to build future-ready civil servants with right attitude, skills and knowledge, aligned to the vision of a "New India" that Prime Minister Narendra Modi often refers to in his speeches.

Key Points:

• Proper institutional framework- The institutional framework will consist of Prime Minister’s Public Human Resources (HR) Council, Capacity Building Commission, Special Purpose Vehicle for owning and operating the digital assets and the technological platform for online training, and Coordination Unit headed by the Cabinet Secretary.
• Capacity Building Commission- Capacity Building Commission will be set up which will set up a mechanism toharmonise training standards, create shared faculty & resources & will have a supervisory role over all training institutions so that there’s common understanding of India’s aspirations & development goals.
• PM led HR Council – A council headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi will help approve civil services capacity building plans under Mission Karmayogi.
  • The council consist of national & international experts under the chairmanship of Prime Minister.
• Establishment of Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV)- A wholly owned Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) will be set up. The SPV will create and operationalize the content, market place and manage key business services of the iGOT-Karmayogi platform.

Significance:

• Mission Karmayogi is an endeavour to reincarnate a government servant into an ideal karmayogi to serve the nation. It will provide a mechanism for continuous capacity building & constant updating of the talent pool.
• The programme will also help in making the civil servants more professional, progressive, energetic, inculcating right attitude, technology-enabled which is aligned to the vision of a “New India”.
• This will help in ending the culture of working in silos and to overcome the multiplicity of training curriculum which we have because of institutions spread all over the country.

 Reason for Mission:

• At present bureaucracy is facing challenges like- Rule orientation, political interference, inefficiency with promotions, and generalist and specialist conflict.
• To change the status quo of civil services and bring about the long pending civil services reforms.
• The capacity of Civil Services plays a vital role in rendering a wide variety of services, implementing welfare programs and performing core governance functions.

 Features of the scheme:

• Tech-Aided: The capacity building will be delivered through iGOTKarmayogi digital platform, with content drawn from global best practices.The platform will act as a launchpad for the National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building (NPCSCB).
• Coverage: To cover around 46 lakh central employees, a sum of ₹ 510.86 crore will be spent over a period of 5 years from 2020-21 to 2024-25. The expenditure is partly funded by multilateral assistance to the tune of $50 million.
• Shift from Rules to Roles: The programme will support a transition from “rules-based to roles-based” Human Resource Management (HRM) so that work allocations can be done by matching an official’s competencies to the requirements of the post.Apart from domain knowledge training, the scheme will focus on “functional and behavioural competencies” as well, and also includes a monitoring framework for performance evaluations.
• Integrated Initiative: Eventually, service matters such as confirmation after probation period, deployment, work assignments and notification of vacancies will all be integrated into the proposed framework.

 Governance Structure:

• Human Resource Council: NPCSCB will be governed by the Prime Minister’s Human Resource Council, which will also include State Chief Ministers, Union Cabinet Ministers, and Experts. This council will approve and review civil service capacity building programmes.
• Cabinet Secretary Coordination Unit: There will be a Cabinet Secretary Coordination Unit comprising select secretaries and cadre controlling authorities.
• Capacity Building Commission: Also, there will be a Capacity Building Commission, which will include experts in related fields and global professionals. This commission will prepare and monitor annual capacity building plans and audit human resources available in the government.
• Special Purpose Vehicle: Finally, there will be a wholly-owned Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), which will govern the iGOT-Karmayogi platform.
  • It will be set up under Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013.
  • The SPV will be a “not-for-profit” company and will own and manage the iGOT-Karmayogi platform.
  • The SPV will create and operationalize the content, market place and manage key business services of the iGOT-Karmayogi platform, relating to content validation, independent proctored assessments and telemetry data availability.
  • The SPV will own all Intellectual Property Rights on behalf of the Government of India.

Monitoring and Evaluation Framework: An appropriate monitoring and evaluation framework will also be put in place for performance evaluation of all users of the iGOT-Karmayogi platform so as to generate a dashboard view of Key Performance Indicators.

 To conclude, the ultimate aim of Mission Karmayogi is to ensure “Ease of Living” for the common man, “Ease of Doing Business” and Citizen-Centricity that is reducing the gap between the government and the citizens. This can only be achieved by regular and constructive involvement by the government and civil servants.

The challenges of incentives–linked training:

The palpable lack of interest in existing civil services training programmes has troubled administrative reform committees over the decades. Thus far, the response has been to recommend that incentives and penalties be linked to performance in training. The Yugandhar Committee made this recommendation in 2003 and the Mid-Career Training Programme (MCTP), introduced in 2007, linked career progression to the completion of training programmes. On similar lines, the current reform aims to link training with career milestones and department performance through “continuous performance analysis, data driven goal-setting and real time monitoring”, including the use of annual scorecards and rankings.First, while the emphasis on incentives and motivation is important, previous attempts to link training to performance reveal implementation challenges. Civil servants must allocate time and get clearance to attend training, especially at locations away from their posting. Systems that don’t value training can make attendance difficult as demonstrated in practice with the MCTP. Eventually, this leads to incentive-linked training becoming a burden rather than an opportunity to learn. Here, the proposed digital ecosystem and self-learning model offered by the iGOT platform could help overcome some of these challenges through flexibility in terms of location and the availability of time. However, if adequate time for online coursework is not prioritised by the department but transferred to often already overloaded individuals, one might end up with another version of the same problem.

Second, the methodology for performance assessment must be consistent, credible and transparent. As seen in the case of other initiatives to rank and induce competition in public programmes, frequent changes in the scoring methodology provide unclear signals on whether improvement in ranks reflects better performance or the re-weighting of score components. If poorly conceived and executed, incentive-linked training runs the risk of becoming a source of demotivation in the system. Getting assessments right will become particularly important and challenging in the context of a large and diverse public service workforce.

Need a diverse and decentralized learning ecosystem:

Mission Karmayogi departs from previous administrative reform initiatives by going beyond Group A and B officers to include in its ambit the 89 per cent of public service workers in Group C — many of whom serve frontline functions. This is a much-needed prioritisation. However, it is for precisely this reason that the emphasis on digital content and training, and the centralised institutional architecture of the proposed reform must be balanced by an understanding of the contexts and needs of diverse workers and learners.While digital learning undoubtedly offers numerous possibilities, we must also consider which aspect of learning it is best suited to address. The iGOT pilot has already trained a large number of frontline medical workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. The skills imparted here are specific to a problem and moment in the careers of workers with existing fundamental knowledge of medicine and public health. Distance self-learning can build supplementary skills and update knowledge at the frontlines but may not be well suited for core knowledge development. This is a salient issue today as universities across the world grapple with blended learning during the pandemic. Feedback, a space to clarify doubts, mentorship and peer-learning are all essential for the field-based work our civil servants perform and must be prioritised.

For instance, our experience shows that rural women community health workers preferred residential training because they were empowered in the presence of their peers and were able to focus on learning while being away from their homes. While self-driven online training can work very well in some contexts, in others it may be disempowering and require further sacrifice, especially from our most constrained and vulnerable grassroots workers and volunteers.Further, training assessment occurs most effectively at the local, organisational level. This requires precise estimation of existing knowledge, skilling requirements, and an understanding of the needs of the population being served. The new system must find ways in which departments proactively strengthen investments in training their own employees, beyond goal setting, annual plans and financial contributions, as envisioned in the current proposal. But diversity isn’t limited to departments, it is spread across states and districts. State responses to Covid-19 have taught us how decentralisation enables responsiveness, adaptability and improves outcomes. A new plan and architecture for capacity building must reflect, support and strengthen the diversity of public institutions and public service providers.

The importance of organisational culture:

Finally—and most importantly—extensive research shows that individual-level technical, behavioural and professional training alone offer limited gains to performance in complex systems. Civil servants must contend with deeply embedded norms of governance, complex tasks and outcomes, overload, extensive networks of partners, and exogenous socio-political factors. Norms of hierarchy and bureaucratic processes can stifle innovation even among highly skilled workers. In short, the culture in which competence is deployed is as important as competence itself.Shifting organisational culture towards better performance is no simple task and requires reformers to think beyond competence from the outset. While training might increase awareness, behavioural change requires that information is supported by existing organisational practices and norms. Here, organisations that foster problem-solving, participation, trust, shared professional norms, and a strong sense of mission are likely to perform much better in delivering public services. This learning culture is not created and sustained by providing better training alone or linking it to incentives and penalties, but vitally through practices of shared vision development, a commitment to learning across all levels of the organisation, purposeful work and the empowerment of employees. The collective values that Mission Karmayogi highlights require systemic engagement and change.

Conclusion:

• To serve the need of the hour and the nation adequately, National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building will bring a shift in the human resource management from ‘rules-based’ to a ‘roles-based’ approach.
• This shall put great emphasis on the role of ‘on-site learning’ while complementing the ‘off-site learning’ methodology. Linking training and development of competencies of civil servants will be targetted through Mission Karmayogi.

Reading between the lines

Prelims:

Q:“…incentives and penalties be linked to performance in training.” Is / Was the vision of which committee ?

(a) Mission Karmayogi
(b) Yugandhar
(c) IInd Administrative Reform Committee
(d) None of the above

Mains:

What led the Government for formation of Mission Karmayogi ? What are the challenges ahead ?
Summing up briefly, please state that in what ways it is different from the recommendations of previous committees ?