Posts Tagged DMG

My op-ed published in the NEWS yesterday

The debate on the scrapping of Musharraf’s devolution experiment cannot hide or ignore two key imperatives. First, that all military dictators have a penchant for local democracy at the expense of provincial autonomy and the country’s parliamentary structure. Second, never has Pakistan been so vulnerable to state’s fragmentation and erosion of trust in public institutions. This is why the elected government, with bipartisan consensus, has proceeded to restructure the 2002 Local Government Ordinances.

But, the debate remains obsessed with the district management group (DMG), a cadre that is a much weaker and tainted inheritor of administrative structures instituted by the Mughal and British empires. Therefore, the proposed restoration of executive magistracy has been termed yet another big conspiracy by the supposedly powerful DMG, which allegedly has influenced the political elites to revive the colonial institution of the district magistrate. The simple question is if the DMG were so powerful, it would have saved its field structure and magistracy nearly a decade ago. (more…)

The captioned article of mine appeared in News on Sunday a week ago. I was quite glad to note that the NEWS wrote an editorial on this subject and picked up a few concerns highlighted in my longer piece. I have reproduced it at the end of this post.

A little news item that appeared a few weeks ago was ignored by our all-knowing analysts and TV channels. Reportedly, the Federal Public Service Commission failed to recruit all the vacancies that were advertised for the CSS competitive examination held in 2007. Out of 290 available posts, the number of successful candidates in the 2007 CSS competition was merely 190, leaving almost 100 vacancies unoccupied.

In the photo above Founder of Pakistan Mohammad Ali Jinnah is seen talking to Pakistani Civil Servants (circa 1947)

Last year, too, the government could not get enough number of successful CSS candidates to fill in the available posts and 47 vacancies could not be filled. Such instances have occurred before but given the state of unemployment this is, to put it mildly, shocking.

The truth of the matter is that entering the civil service is no longer an alluring career option for the talented young men and women of this country. Perhaps, the greatest damage to the attractiveness of the civil service came in the wake of the devolution plan that rendered the most coveted service group — District Management Group – unpalatable. Within days, the district administrators had no prescribed career-paths and that they had to be subservient to small time political cronies of the central political elites. (more…)