This post is written by Anirudh Dinesh and Beth Simone Noveck, The Governance Lab. This article is part of a series by the Governance Lab on training 21st century public sector leaders.

  • The problem: Civil servants who interact with citizens lack the skills to deliver effective customer service.
  • Why it matters: Better customer service will improve what the Government of India calls “Ease of Living” for citizens and grow the economy.
  • The solution: The Capacity Building Commission will help government departments evaluate and benchmark the competencies they need and match them with training opportunities to help fill the competency gap.

Prime Minister Modi established the Government of India’s Capacity Building Commission (CBC) on April 1, 2021 to reimagine how the state can deliver high-quality citizen services. According to the Commission’s chairman, Adil Zainulbhai and its secretary, Hemang Jani, the Commission will work with 93 central government departments and more than 800 training institutions across India to train over three million central government employees.

The competencies that civil servants are trained in should not be defined from the top down

By training employees, especially those who interact with citizens on a daily basis like those in the railways and postal departments, the hope is to impart new ways of working that translate into more effective and trustworthy government and better quality interactions with residents. The Commission has set itself two “north stars” or stretch goals to accomplish, namely to contribute to improving the “ease of living” for citizens and to advance Prime Minister Modi’s vision to make India a $5 trillion economy.

What the Commission does

__ “We are working with each ministry to understand what is their most important training need”__ - Adil Zainulbhai, Chairman, Capacity Building Commission

The Capacity Building Commission’s philosophy is that the competencies that civil servants are trained in should not be defined from the top down. Rather, the Commission wants each ministry to answer: What is the single most important thing we need to accomplish and then define the competencies they need to achieve that goal. The Commission aims to help ministries create their own capacity building plans and either develop or procure the appropriate training programs to meet the agency’s core goals. The commission’s early work has been focused on both the supply and demand side for training. On the demand side, the Commission seeks to understand the most important training needs of each ministry. “We’re not just creating documents but we’re focused on getting it done,” says Zainulbhai.

On the supply side, the Commission is working with training institutes across the country to create a set of standards and an accreditation mechanism with a maturity model (gold, silver, platinum standard) to supply high-quality training content and be able to collect data and track performance in order to measure how investments in training translate into service improvements over time.

The commission is also preparing a “state of the civil service” report to share its learnings and organising a global conference on public sector upskilling.

Creating a baseline of skills

__ “A 21st century civil servant is a person who has 21st century skills. The skills of tomorrow are collaboration, networking, solving problems that are not well-stated, understanding the needs of citizens and design-thinking”__ - Hemang Jani, Secretary, Capacity Building Commission.

An important first step in creating a capacity building programme is to understand what competencies already exist (or not) in the civil service. We asked both Zainulbhai and Jani about the CBC’s thinking about creating such a baseline of skills. The Commission’s approach, Jani explained to us, is to ask each ministry to look at its training needs from three “lenses:”

  1. Does the ministry have the capacity to deliver on “national priorities”? And are government employees aware of these national priorities?

  2. Does the ministry have the capacity necessary to deliver “citizen-centric” services?

  3. The “technology lens”: Do civil servants not only understand the challenges posed by technology but also appreciate new technologies and the solutions that could come from them?

The Commission also looks at capacity building on three levels:

  1. The individual level: What knowledge, skill and attitude an individual needs.
  2. The organisation level: What rules and procedures might be hindering service delivery.
  3. The institutional level: How to create an enabling environment for employees to upskill themselves resulting in better public services.

Creating the programme

__ “There are 750 training institutions within the Government of India and several outside it. What we (the Commission) are doing is to play matchmaker between an institute that has the capacity to create a training course with the ministries who need that course”__ - Adil Zainulbhai, Chairman, Capacity Building Commission

Despite having over three million central government employees, “we’ve not had a well-defined framework for training this civil service,” says Jani. In order to accelerate the uptaking of training in modern ways of working for 60 ministries with 93 departments and over 2,600 organisations under them, the Commission has created a platform called iGOT (Integrated Online Training), which will be a centralised repository for training programmes.

Each ministry will decide on priorities for its own employees but courses created and made available for one ministry will be available and open to all. For instance, a course on “citizen-centricity” (one of the pilot courses that will be delivered for over 100,000 employees of the Indian Railways) will also be taken by a similar number of employees of the Indian Postal Services, since both departments have identified the need for their front-line staff to be trained to improve the quality of their interactions with citizens.

iGOT will also have different sets of offerings depending on specific roles. For example, more senior staff, they say, value mentorship programmes, succession planning and immersion training to understand how a sector works when they enter a new ministry for the first time. The Commission has also found that a lot of the “required training” at the higher levels currently ends up being obsolete since they are required to be taken only once in five or 10 years. iGOT will help transition senior leaders to a more continuous learning model and also provide relevant, just-in-time training. “Most adults like to learn when they need it. Not when someone else forces them to learn something and says ‘please learn this now and it will be helpful for you five years from now’.”

The courses on iGOT will be a mix of online and in-person offerings. Zainulbhai explained: “Most of the courses will be delivered either physically or “phy-gitally” (part physical, part digital). What we’ve found is that, especially for topics that involve some element of behaviour change like improving citizen-centricity, the course needs to be delivered in-person rather than online. But there might be some topics that are purely procedural that can be delivered entirely online. So it will be a mix (of modalities) and will evolve over time.”

In the long run, iGOT will eventually also enable employees to track their courses taken, enabling individuals, government and researchers to track public sector competencies and measure outcomes. “Each job will be tagged with certain competencies that a candidate will need in order to be eligible for consideration and they will either have to take a training course via iGOT to be certified for that competency or appear for an exam to be certified for it.” But the challenge, he says, is not only setting up the digital platform for certification. Each ministry will have to tag every job posting with a set of competencies (which they aren’t setup to do yet) and also develop a way to test for those competencies.

Assessing the training programmes

“We are focused on a future where training evaluation is the norm” - Hemang Jani, Secretary, Capacity Building Commission.

Jani explains that the Commission is developing its own learning assessment model based on learnings from over 60 different global models. In the case of the citizen-centricity course for the railways, for example, they started with a baseline survey to understand conflicts between front-line staff and citizens. The training programme was developed in response to the learning from the survey and six months after the training programme is delivered, another survey will follow in order to measure the impact of the training programme on real-world changes in service delivery for citizens.

Why civil servants should take the training courses

“Of the 3.1 million central government employees only, perhaps, 10% have received regular training in the past.” - Hemang Jani, Secretary, Capacity Building Commission.

The opportunity to learn and grow is one of the incentives that motivates civil servants to take up training. While other countries are linking promotions and new opportunities to training, the opportunity to access training itself is an incentive for many employees “who are delighted that someone is designing training courses just for them.” According to Jani, only 10% of the 3.1 million central government employees receive regular training today.

He adds that the commission has also found that if training is made available at the time of need for the civil servant, people are more than happy to take up the opportunity.

_Based on an interview with Mr Adil Zainulbhai and Mr Hemang Jani on May 3, 2022. _

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