While the United Front (UF) government has come in for a lot of flak for its recent decision to clip the Disinvestment Commission's wings, what is not so well-known is that it is trying to do much the same with the Public Enterprises Selection Board (PESB) which is in charge of selecting candidates for public enterprises across the country. Indeed, it has also come up with another decision recently to ensure that the role of the ministries -- the ministers as well as the bureaucrats -- in selecting candidates for PSUs in their domain is not curtailed. Without this power of patronage, and possibly pelf, they probably argue, what's the point of being in government?Last May, for example, the Department of Personnel and Training had come up with an order saying that the PESB's recommendations could be sent directly to the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) in case the administrative ministry didn't take a decision on the PESB recommendations within two months -- very often, the ministries don't wishto turn down a PESB recommendation and so just refuse to act. After a while, the PESB panel lapses automatically, and there's yet another chance to ensure that their candidate gets selected.
Since the move was a good step to cut favouritism, the country's political-bureaucratic class stepped up the pressure and ensured that the order was never fulfilled. Last month, the office of the Establishment Officer (the ACC's secretariat) informed the PESB that the order cannot be implemented for three reasons. All, incidentally, have been countered by the PESB, and are specious. One of these, for example, is that the ACC doesn't have access to the vigilance reports of the candidates in question, and so cannot possibly clear them -- the reports are usually sent by the vigilance commission to the administrative ministries. What the PESB has done is to ask the vigilance commission to send a copy of the candidate's vigilance report to the ACC as well. The solution is a simple one -- the idea, however, is to make a bigthing about it, and scupper the process.
What's even more scandalous, of course, is the way that the administrative ministries are trying to scrap the recommendations of the PESB. Two recent examples that come to mind are those of BHEL and the Airports Authority of India (AAI). While the ACC has written to the PESB stating that its panel on the new chairman and managing director of BHEL has been scrapped, a similar order for the AAI chief's panel is expected shortly. The civil aviation ministry has already written to the Establishment Officer to initiate the process of selection all over again.
In the BHEL case, the PESB had said that its top choice for the post was P. Sasamka Babu, executive director of BHEL in Hyderabad and the second choice was K.G. Ramachandran, director (finance) for the PSU. The ACC, however, has chosen to scrap the panel without giving any reason. One reason, being given unofficially, is that since the outgoing BHEL chief R.K.D. Shah has been granted an extension till May, thepanel was redundant. That, however, is just so much nonsense, since the life of a panel can be extended to a year. In other words, the panel could have been activated after Shah retired in June. It's possible, in fact, to argue that Shah was given an extension with the sole purpose of ensuring that the panel get scrapped. The case of the AAI chief is even more interesting, since at the time that the PESB was conducting its interviews, there was tremendous pressure brought upon it by certain bureaucrats to interview a candidate who did not strictly meet the eligibility criterion. The PESB, however, stuck to its guns and refused to interview the gentleman in question. Interestingly, except for a period of one-and-a-half years, AAI has not had a full-time chief in the last four years. In the event, it has been manned by, undoubtedly, over-worked joint secretaries who have had to handle this as an additional charge. With no full-time chief, it's hardly surprising that the organisation has been plagued by problemssuch as the cargo workers strike and the on-now-off-now strike by the air traffic controllers.
But what could one possibly gain by getting a panel scrapped, especially if the PESB is going to remain adamant and refuses to bow to extraneous pressures? One possibility, of course, is that the next time around, the PESB may be more amenable. The second, and this is the talk of the corridors in various concerned ministries these days, is that scrapping a panel gives favoured candidates a chance to attain enough seniority so as to be able to become eligible. Let's say, for example, that some bureaucrat wants to instal his candidate as the chief of a PSU, but he hasn't completed enough years in the organisation, or is not senior enough -- in the AAI case, for example, the salary drawn by the candidate was one of the various criterion for eligibility. In which case, the favoured candidate obviously cannot be selected now. Given the fact that most jobs have a tenure of at least a few years, this also means thathe/she is out of the reckoning for that much more time. So, why not scrap a few panels and give your man/woman the required time to fulfil the eligibility criterion?
The point here is that the whole purpose behind setting up the PESB was to inject an element of professionalism in the selection of candidates for PSUs. But if the government is going to play around with the PESB's recommendations, then why even go through the sham of the PESB process?
What makes this kind of behaviour even more unfortunate is that the United Front, more than any other government in the country's history, has done the most to try and free the public sector. Essentially, this is what the navratna and the mini-ratna policies introduced by Industry Minister Murasoli Maran were all about. Clearly, what God gives with one hand, he takes with the other.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
