INDIAN CIVIL SERVICES (ICS) – CAREER FOR FUTURE LEADERS OF INDIA

I recently met my friend, who had selected his career in Civil Services like me and the experiences he shared with me was thought-provoking and motivating for young aspirants of Indian Civil Services.

After my friend chose career in Indian Civil Services (ICS), many of his well-wishers criticised the career with several accusations. The allegations they place before him are: “The ICS, specially, Indian Administrative Service (IAS) is highly competitive and disturbing career. Where political interferences disturb your career prospects in the Civil Services,” “You won’t have peaceful time after you join IAS. You have to keep stake your family’s safety for your career,” “You have to synchronise your decisions will meaningless political decisions of uneducated leaders, where money-power, muscle-power and corruption are highly rooted. You should be a ‘Yes Man’ to their short-sighted decisions,” etc.

Though, the comments he received are from people who neither had a career in Civil Services nor could be considered as people with highly intellectual ability, their concern seem to driven, basically, from manipulated information gained through biased media, films, etc. Leaving aside their short sighted concern, he gave importance to his intellect and wisdom, and he gave answer to his critics which can be considered to have deep social concern and feeds moral strength to the aspiring civil service aspirant. My friend’s answer was impregnated in a small story as follows,

There was a forest-fire engulfing the complete area of a dense forest. All the animals in the forest were running away from the area to escape the fire. But, a small bird living in the forest alone was trying to douse the fire by collecting water from nearby stream through its small cone-like beak. And, it was doing it persistently and diligently. An elephant which was one of the animals running away from fire, looking at the silly action of the bird and criticised its action in humiliation. The bird replied magnanimously to the elephant with courage and maturity, "I knew my actions are silly and it will not succeed. Yet, it will show a way for my future generation to this burning problem."

The idea my friend tries to imply: The forest fire in the story implies problems the Indian Bureaucracy faces at present and we, the young citizens of India, as the small bird in the story, should be torch bearers and beacons to show a way to current flaring problem in our Indian society. This requires young leaders ready to sacrifice ourselves for the welfare of society. For this, we have to utilise our knowledge, character, creativity, initiative, etc, to develop into leaders to lead future generations towards bright future for our nation.

The implication of his answer is that we currently face a “Leadership Crisis” in Indian Governance. At present, there are millions of followers ready to follow a leader but we lack a single leader to lead them (leaving aside some great souls in other fields). In current India, there is an existence of “scarcity of leadership” like scarcity of water, proper air, food, etc. This scarcity can be resolved only through young people getting prepared at present to be future leaders of tomorrow. So, career in Civil Services is the one way towards enriching India with “Stalwart Leadership.”