In a development which will go a long way in making civil administration more comprehensive, Union Cabinet, which met under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on September 2, has approved Mission Karmayogi -- National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building (NPCSCB), a comprehensive reform of capacity building apparatus at individual, institutional and process levels for efficient public service delivery. According to official details, Prime Minister Modi led HR Council will approve and monitor civil service capacity building plans.

NPCSCB will consist of four institutional frameworks: Prime Minister’s Public Human Resources (HR) Council, Capacity Building Commission, Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) for owning and operating the digital assets and the technological platform for online training, and Coordination Unit headed by the Cabinet Secretary. In a presentation, Dr C Chandramouli, Secretary, Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), said that NPCSCB has been carefully designed to lay the foundations for capacity building for Civil Servants so that they remain entrenched in Indian culture and sensibilities and remain connected, with their roots, while they learn from the best institutions and practices across the world.

The programme will be delivered by setting up an Integrated Government Online Training-iGOTKarmayogiPlatform. The core guiding principles of the Programme will be supporting transition from ‘Rules based’ to ‘Roles based,’ HR management, aligning work allocation of civil servants by matching their competencies to the requirements of the post, emphasise on 'on-site learning' to complement the ‘off-site’ learning, create an ecosystem of shared training infrastructure including that of learning materials, institutions and personnel, and calibrate all Civil Service positions to a Framework of Roles, Activities and Competencies (FRACs) approach and to create and deliver learning content relevant to the identified FRACs in every government entity.

The programme will also make available to all civil servants an opportunity to continuously build and strengthen their behavioural, functional and domain competencies in their self-driven and mandated learning paths, enable all the Central Ministries and Departments and their organizations to directly invest their resources towards co-creation and sharing the collaborative and common ecosystem of learning through an annual financial subscription for every employee, encourage and partner with the best-in-class learning content creators including public training institutions, universities, start-tips and individual experts and undertake data analytics in respect of data emit provided by iGOT- Karmayogi  pertaining  to  various  aspects  of capacity  building, content creation, user feedback and mapping of competencies and identify areas for policy reforms.

The role of the Capacity Building Commission, apart from ensuring a uniform approach in managing and regulating the capacity building ecosystem on collaborative and co-sharing basis, will be to assist the PM Public Human Resources Council in approving the annual capacity building plans, exercise functional supervision over all Central Training Institutions dealing with civil services capacity building, create shared learning resources, including internal and external faculty and resource centers, coordinate and supervise the implementation of the Capacity Building Plans with the stakeholder Departments, make recommendations on standardization of training and capacity building, pedagogy and methodology, set norms for common mid-career training programs across all civil services, and suggest policy interventions required in the areas of HR Management and Capacity Building to the government.

iGOT-Karmayogi platform brings the scale and state-of-the-art infrastructure to augment the capacities of over two crore officials in India. The platform is expected to evolve into a vibrant and world-class market place for content where carefully curated and vetted digital e-learning material will be made available. Besides capacity building, service matters like confirmation after probation period, deployment, work assignment and notification of vacancies etc. would eventually be integrated with the proposed competency framework. ‘Mission Karmayogi’ aims to prepare the Indian Civil Servant for the future by making him more creative, constructive, imaginative, innovative, proactive, professional, progressive, energetic, enabling, transparent and technology-enabled. Empowered with specific role-competencies, the civil servant will be able to ensure efficient service delivery of the highest quality standards.

To cover around 46 lakh Central employees, a sum of Rs 510.86 crore will be spent over a period of five years from 2020-21 to 2024-25. The expenditure is partly funded by multilateral assistance to the tune of $ 50 million. A wholly owned NPCSCB will be set up under Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013. The SPV will be a ‘not-for-profit’ company and will own and manage iGOT-Karmayogi platform. The SPV will create and operationalise the content, market place and manage key business services of iGOT-Karmayogi platform, relating to content validation, independent proctored assessments and telemetry data availability. The SPV will own all Intellectual Property Rights on behalf of the Government of India. An appropriate  monitoring and evaluation framework will also be put in place for performance evaluation of all users of the iGOT-Karmayogi platform so as to generate a dashboard view of key performance indicators.

The capacity of civil services plays a vital role in rendering a wide variety of services, implementing welfare programs and performing core governance functions. A transformational change in civil service capacity – effected by organically linking the transformation of work culture, strengthening public institutions and adopting modern technology to build civil service capacity with the overall aim of ensuring efficient delivery of services to citizens – is the need of the hour.