Mismatched incentives

Just giving out gongs won’t serve the purpose either of motivating civil servants or attracting qualified ones.

This year, from a pool of around 68,000 Nepali civil servants spread over three tiers of the government, not one was eligible for the annual ‘Best Civil Servant’ award. In fact, for the eighth year running, no one has received this coveted honour. Perhaps the criteria are too stringent. To be eligible, a civil servant must have served in a permanent position for at least 15 years. The concerned individual should have achieved 100 percent performance evaluation for the past five years, not faced any departmental action in the past 15 years, and not have unresolved financial discrepancies in the year of evaluation. And yes, they must also have regularly submitted property details. For one person to meet all these criteria is nigh on impossible. It does not help that at times even when the ‘best employee’ has been selected, the person was later found to be undeserving. For instance, the award’s first recipient, Surya Prasad Gautam, was later dragged into controversy for supposedly grading his own wife's Public Service Commission examination papers. This makes the task of the selection panel harder still: they don’t want to get it wrong and later be mocked and trolled.