Yet another committee on administrative reforms is being set up by the ministry of personnel, this time to be headed by former Karnataka chief minister M Veerappa Moily.
Ministry sources say the committee will most probably have former revenue secretary Vineeta Rai as member-secretary.
The commission will have four other non-political members, likely to be former bureaucrats. "We are deliberately appointing non-political members to the commission so that bureaucrats accept whatever recommendations are made by the commission," said sources.
The commission will be required to look into ways in which the Indian civil service can be restructured which may include cabinet secretary BK Chaturvedi's idea of recruitment at the school-leaving stage rather than wait for graduates to go though a gruelling selection process.
According to top ministry sources, the commission will also be looking into amending service rules, some of which appear to have become outmoded.
"The prime minister has given his approval to the setting up of the commission and despite the fact that there have been other commissions that have submitted reports, he wants this commission to reflect the government's concerns on administrative reforms," said the sources.
The prime minister is reportedly keen on carving out 'a lean and mean bureaucracy' which will be able to respond much better to a more regulatory role that he envisages for them.
The collectors' conference, which was called by the prime minister in May, was also a part of this exercise.
Earlier, reports submitted to the ministry of personnel had pointed out anomalies in the system such as no weighting was being given to specialisation and additional qualifications.
Apart from that the problem of uneven annual confidential reports, things senior officers consider while writing ATRs (action taken reports) will also be taken into account.
"It was found that bureaucrats, working directly under political bosses, got more generous evaluations than those working under senior bureaucrats," said a source.
But bureaucrats are divided over how to react to the proposed commission, since this is not the first commission promising reforms of the 150-year-old system.
