Mission Karmayogi: Cabinet approves national programme for civil services capacity building

The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved Mission Karmayogi, a national programme for civil services capacity building. Union Minister Prakash Javadekar said that officers and employees in government will get the opportunity to improve their performance with Mission Karmayogi.

"Mission Karmayogi is constituted to build future-ready civil service with right attitude, skills & knowledge, aligned to the vision of New India. It focuses on competency led capacity building," said C Chandramouli, Secretary Department of Personnel & Training, Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievance and Pensions.

He added, "Mission Karmayogi looks at a new national architecture for civil services capacity building. It focuses not only on the individual capacity building but on institutional capacity building and also on process."

"At present, there is a diverse and fragmented training landscape. There are inconsistencies in training priorities by various training institutions in various ministries; this has prevented shared understanding of India's developmental aspirations," he added.

"A civil servant should be imaginative & innovative, proactive  & polite, professional & progressive, energetic & enabling, transparent & tech-enabled, constructive & creative in order to meet the challenges of the society," further added Chandramouli.

Union Minister of State Jitendra Singh said that Mission Karmayogi is an "endeavour to reincarnate a government servant into an ideal karma yogi to serve the nation. It will provide a mechanism for continuous capacity building and constant updating of talent pool".

"Earlier it was rule-specific, now it will be role-specific. There is now an institutionalised capacity building. Working of departments in silos is eliminated, training opportunities available for all," added Singh.

The programme will prescribe and monitor annual capacity building plans for all departments and services. The digital learning framework (IGOT-Karmayogi Platform) will provide anytime-anywhere learning to 2.5 crore civil servants.

The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi has approved launching of a National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building (NPCSCB) with the following institutional framework:-(i) Prime Minister's Public Human Resources (HR) Council, (ii) Capacity Building Commission, (iii) Special Purpose Vehicle for owning and operating the digital assets and the technological platform for online training, (iv) Coordination Unit headed by the Cabinet Secretary.

Salient Features: 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 the 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, to emphasize on 'on-site learning' to complement the ‘off-site’ learning, to create an ecosystem of shared training infrastructure including that of learning materials, institutions and personnel, to 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, to make available to all civil servants, an opportunity to continuously build and strengthen their Behavioral, Functional and Domain Competencies in their self-driven and mandated learning paths. 

It also includes enabling 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, to encourage and partner with the best-in-class learning content creators including public training institutions, universities, start-tips and individual experts, to 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.

Objectives: It is also proposed to set up a Capacity Building Commission, with a view to ensuring a uniform approach in managing and regulating the capacity building ecosystem on the collaborative and co-sharing basis.

The role of Commission will be as under-

To assist the PM Public Human Resources 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 centres.
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.

The 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 were 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.

Financial implications: To cover around 46 lakh central employees, a sum of Rs 510.86 crore will be spent over a period of 5 years from 2020-21 to 2024-25. The expenditure is partly funded by multilateral assistance to the tune of USD 50 million. A wholly owned Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) for 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 operationalize the content, market place and manage key business services ofiGOT-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.

Background: 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 is proposed to be affected 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.

A Public Human Resources Council comprising of select Union Ministers, Chief Ministers, eminent public HR practitioners, thinkers, global thought leaders and Public Service functionaries under the Chairmanship of Prime Minister will serve as the apex body for providing strategic direction to the task of Civil Services Reform and capacity building.