The other day, the UPSC announced the results of the Civil Services Examination 2022. The media reported the results with glee. Not one of the interviewed candidates seems to come with any real-world working experience. They all went to coaching classes after their college, wrote the exam and cracked it after three, four or more years. Most of them will be posted as IAS officers.
Can India afford inexperienced bureaucrats? It has been the considered view of many commentators and experts that working experience has to be made compulsory for those giving the CSE exam. It's through this exam that IAS, IPS, IFS, IFoS, and IRS officers are selected.
IAS officers are given a tough job right from the first day of their service. They are trained well for about a year before they are given a posting. But that one year of training happens in a certain limited setting. During the training phase, they interact with the same class of people with no real interest in helping the candidates gain practical knowledge.
People with real-world experience have a better understanding of the human world and how humans behave in an organization.
A bureaucrat's job is complex. Generalists like IAS officers are anyways ill-equipped on the technical front. On top of that, zero work experience only makes them all the more inferior in terms of practical knowledge.
