What is Mission Karmayogi? Modi Govt's latest move on Civil Services reform

The Union Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday approved the launching of a National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building (NPCSCB) for comprehensive reform of the Indian bureaucracy and help civil servants improve their performance on a perpetual basis.

Dubbed 'Mission Karmayogi', the government says it is an endeavor to incarnate civil services into a real 'Karmayogi' who is creative, constructive, pro-active, and technically empowered to face future challenges in the society for efficient public service delivery. The aim is to form a 'role-based system' instead of a 'rule-based' practices in the bureaucracy.

Capacity building for civil servant

According to a government statement, 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 (iGOT) Karmayogi Platform.

The programme will calibrate all civil service positions to a Framework of Roles, Activities, and Competencies (FRACs) approach and create and deliver learning content relevant to the identified FRACs in every Government entity. This will avail civil servants an opportunity to continuously build and strengthen their behavioral, functional, and domain competencies in their self-driven and mandated learning paths.

Mission Karmayogi aims to 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. The government will also encourage and partner with the best-in-class learning content creators including public training institutions, universities, start-tips, and individual experts.

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PM-led HR Council

The Prime Minister will head the Public Human Resources Council comprising of select Union Ministers, Chief Ministers, eminent public HR practitioners, thinkers, global thought leaders, and Public Service functionaries that will serve as the apex body for providing strategic direction to the task of civil services reform and capacity building.

The role of the Commission will be:

• To assist the Council in approving the Annual Capacity Building Plans;
• To exercise functional supervision over all Central Training Institutions dealing with civil services capacity building;
• To create shared learning resources, including internal and external faculty and resource centers;
• To coordinate and supervise the implementation of the Capacity Building Plans with the stakeholder Departments;
• To make recommendations on standardization of training and capacity building, pedagogy and methodology;
• To set norms for common mid-career training programs across all civil services;
• To suggest policy interventions required in the areas of HR Management and Capacity Building to the Government.

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iGOT-Karmayogi platform

A not-for-profit Special Purpose Vehicle will own and operate the online platform iGOT Karmayogi to facilitate world-class learning to emphasize on 'on-site learning' to complement the ‘off-site’ learning. The platform is expected to be a 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.

Union Minister Dr. Jitendra Singh said Mission Karmayogi will prove to be "the largest Civil Services Reform in the world in terms of depth and spread." He added that mid-career training will be available to all services at all levels in all languages and underlined that this will help in the professional delivery of services at all levels of the Central government. 

This programme has an outlay of Rs 510.86 crore over a period of five years to cover around 46 lakh Central employees.

(PTI Photo for representation)

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