Civil service reform

PAKISTAN cannot become a modern state as long as its bureaucracy continues to be organised around hierarchy, seniority and generalist recruitment.

The system has become better at managing careers than solving problems. It rewards position rather than expertise and performance, and protects procedure more readily than outcomes. Moreover, a bureaucracy built primarily for routine administration can hardly meet the ever-growing economic, technological, environmental and social challenges confronting the government. It is against this backdrop that a ‘new’ civil service restructuring plan has been unveiled by the planning minister. The plan proposes professional cadres, seeks changes to the CSS examination, opens up senior posts to wider competition and links performance to rewards. It also proposes a new civil-service training structure. These ideas may not be new but they do make sense.

However, the problem is that the plan represents a piecemeal approach. Several reform programmes were proposed in the last couple of decades; none was implemented due to resistance from bureaucracy and lack of political will. This plan could have provided a useful starting point for comprehensive civil service reform had it not cherry-picked proposals from an earlier reform exercise.

The report, on which the new proposals draw, was prepared by the Institutional Reforms Committee headed by Dr Ishrat Husain in 2021, and covered recruitment, training, career progression, specialisation, performance management, accountability and the structure of the senior bureaucracy. It explicitly said that civil service reform had to be holistic. Reforming one segment of the system without addressing the others, it warned, could backfire. That raises the more important question: why are these proposals being put forward again, instead of building on the earlier blueprint? The government needs to explain what happened to the previous reform exercise, which of its recommendations were implemented, which were rejected and why. Instead, the government appears to have taken selected recommendations from it. That risks producing another reorganisation plan without actually changing the way the bureaucracy and state function.

Civil service reform is not about creating new cadres, changing examination rules or merging training institutions. It is about changing incentives and institutional behaviour. The state needs specialists who can understand increasingly complex problems. It needs managers who can deliver. It needs promotion based on performance rather than seniority alone. And it needs accountability that applies to failure as much as success. Most importantly, reform requires consistency. The 2021 blueprint already provided much of the framework needed for this. If it fell short of anything, it should have been fixed instead of being discarded.

Published in Dawn, September 22nd, 2026