Kuno field director says officers need longer tenures for real change in the system

Kuno Field Director Uttam Kumar Sharma has posted a two-page article on his X handle. In it, he questions the short tenures of bureaucrats and says postings must be longer if meaningful and lasting change is to be brought to the system. The post has set off a discussion.

The article is titled "The Value of Tenure: Can a Bureaucrat Change the System?" It argues that longer tenures for officers are essential for meaningful and lasting change in the administrative set-up.

Sharma writes that the length of an officer's tenure affects their ability to govern and bring about change. According to him, in a tenure of less than a year, the system is mostly kept running by junior staff.

Between one and two years, the system gradually begins to run according to the officer's wishes and priorities. After three years, if the officer has the will and commitment, new experiments begin to take shape and institutional change becomes possible.

He writes that when a young officer joins the civil service, they bring idealism and a drive to achieve something. They want to correct what they see as wrong and bring good, lasting change to the system. But the administrative set-up has its own settled ways.

The young officer soon realises that changing such a large system is not as easy as it first seemed. A short tenure does not even leave enough time to understand the system, let alone change it.

According to Sharma, repeated short tenures gradually make idealism yield to pragmatism. Officers start to focus more on simply keeping the system running than on changing the way it works.

The post also says that some officers, knowing their tenure may be short, begin with big announcements, ambitious promises and revolutionary speeches.

They also know that they may no longer be in the post by the time accountability for implementing these promises is fixed. Even so, their image as a farsighted reformer endures, the post says.

Sharma added that under the current arrangement an officer cannot always decide the length of their own tenure, as transfers and postings are not in their hands. Everyone wants to bring change, but some get the chance and some do not.