CSB's prerogative.

THE federal government has recently announced a change in the selection and promotion policy of civil servants. As per the new policy, greater discretion has been given to the Central Selection Board, which is a body of senior civil servants from the Establishment branch who determine which civil servants deserve to be promoted. Now 30 discretionary marks will be granted by the CSB, in contrast to the 15 allowed earlier. These 30 marks will be awarded on the CSB's assessment of whether an officer is fit to take a leadership/management role on the basis of 'intelligence reports'.

It seems that the serious institutional reforms (which might take longer but is a better solution for this country's entrenched and inefficient bureaucratic system) the federal government once promised have been sidelined in favour of a convenient policy change used by governments in the past to rig the CSB so that they could fill the higher echelons of our governmental departments with their favourites, and so on.

While helpful in allowing a government to control the bureaucracy, such a strategy only increases favouritism and nepotism in the upper management of the civil services in the long term. Thus, such promotion policies, which allow the CSB to have unstructured discretion in the appointment and promotion of officers, have consistently been held to be illegal.

In the Amanullah Khan case, the Supreme Court enumerated that 'The seven instruments that are most useful in the structuring of discretionary power are open plans, open policy statements, open rules, open findings, open reasons, open precedents and fair informal procedure'. Simply put, the apex court held that the exercise of any discretion by a public authority should be accountable, transparent, reasonable and non-discriminatory.

The promise of serious reforms has been sidelined.

Almost a decade ago, former chief justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Chaudhry, in one of his better thought-out suo motus, applied this principle to the promotion of civil servants in the landmark Tariq Azizuddin case.

In its judgement, the Supreme Court held that the absolute discretion by the CSB in the selection and promotion of officers, which was and continues to be usually employed in a corrupt manner, is illegal. The apex court held that as per the Civil Servants Act and the requirement of Article 4 of the Constitution, any discretion exercised by the CSB should be structured, open and transparent. Basically, CSB members...