New Year’s Wish - A Prime Minister’s Internship Programme
New Year’s Wish - A Prime Minister’s Internship Programme
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to work with the Government of Karnataka in their interactions with the 12th Finance Commission. A key event during that period was a visit by the Commission to hear the state’s preliminary views. It was a formal occasion with the Chief Minister, Cabinet ministers and senior bureaucrats. The state made a professional presentation on its financial position and its recommendations on centre-state fiscal relations. I sat there, delighted to be a part of the process, but also struck that in the grand hall with over a hundred people, only two were below the age of forty, and none was younger than thirty.
I compared this to my own international professional experience, where much of the “grunt” work was done by junior staff, but also by a steady stream of student interns. Internship programmes were not just a public relations exercise to attract future employees, but an integral part of institutional culture: we pushed hard on the interns, and they brought their raw energy and unvarnished questioning of all they saw, which kept us on our toes.
As I recalled this, I remembered the preparatory work for the presentation to the Commission: done by senior bureaucrats and their seasoned departmental staff, much midnight oil was burnt in number-crunching and data compilation, stuff that could easily have been done by student interns.
My subsequent experiences with governments at various levels have reinforced this view: we have almost no opportunities to bring the youth into a range of governmental activities, from the mundane to the sublime. This has far-reaching consequences, and raises questions about institutional design in government, especially fifty years after Independence, when it is perhaps time to move beyond just the steel frame.
Governments across the world are pulsating with student internships. There is also huge value placed on spending time with government even beyond internships. For example, one of most sought-after placements for any law graduate in America is a 1-2 year clerkship with a Supreme Court judge; clerks could well move beyond this to private practice, but these experiences stay with them throughout their life, and often lead them to public service at some future point.
Like with every innovation, there had to be a first time. The practice of law clerks began with a judge called Horace Gray in the 1870s, where he paid out of his personal funds for such assistance, until Congress finally approved funding in 1916. Today, judges in that country’s Supreme Court, district courts and circuit courts have three to four law clerks each.
The United States now has well-established internship processes across all arms of the government, with the website www.studentjobs.gov providing a list of opportunities. However, many other countries also have internship programmes.
When I have brought up government internships in India with those in government, they are often struck by the possibilities. But then a whole range of questions come up: how will they be recruited, what will their compensation be, what privileges will they have, can they make file notings, will this result in patronage, what about confidentiality, and so on. Admittedly, there are a whole host of tactical issues that need to be addressed – and they must be, to have a successful internship programme – but all these questions have answers, if there were an over-arching strategic imperative.
To make progress on this idea, we need to overcome two independent mental-blocks. The first has to do with our attitude towards the youth in India: we tend to treat youngsters as immature until they “officially” become adults, whereupon we expect some mysterious switch to be thrown so that they can make important decisions. The second issue is the relationship between the state and society at large – we invariably think of them as separate compartments, and government work as “sarkari” work meant for babus and politicians. In fact, overcoming these mindsets could be among the strongest arguments to have a government internship programme.
What is required is a trigger event, a bold initiative. This could begin at the very top, for example at the Prime Minister’s Office, especially given the current occupant with his academic credentials. Imagine a Prime Minister’s Internship Programme (PMIP) announced as a small programme initially– say 20 post-graduate internships – with recruitment at the top institutions in the country, across liberal arts, social sciences and economics. Imagine the PMO competing with the best business houses at the IITs and IIMs. I guarantee that a stint at the Prime Minister’s Office would rank higher than most banking, consulting or industrial assignments - witness the desire of India’s youth to engage when invited.
A Prime Minister’s Internship Programme could have several benefits: first, it is a low-cost way to bring the energy and ideas of the youth into government; second, it opens up government to be more porous and accommodating of change, an outcome with long-term implications; third - and most important - it gives outsiders a working knowledge of government.
A well-designed and executed PMIP could have large ripple effects. It could move beyond the PM’s office to other ministries. MPs could also have interns (arguably a better usage of their funds than MPLADS). States could have Chief Minister’s Internship Programmes - CMIPs - and legislators’ internship programmes. In fact, this is the kind of initiative that could mushroom quite quickly into a large movement, spilling from one government department to another within the system, and across a range of educational institutions across the country.
A Prime Minister’s Internship Programme could be one way to do something meaningful with our demographic dividend. Wishful thinking? What better time than on New Year’s Eve?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The author is founder of Janaagraha. He can be reached at ramesh@janaagraha.org