THE CIVIL SERVICES BILL

The Government is committed to bring in a Civil Services Law to provide a statutory
basis for the regulation of the Civil Services in India, as enshrined in Article 309 of
the Constitution of India, to regulate the appointment and conditions of the Civil
Servants, to lay down and review the fundamental values of Civil Services, the Civil
Services Code of Ethics, Civil Service Management Code, to establish Civil Services
Authority for facilitating review and proper development of Civil Services and in
order to develop Civil Services as a professional, neutral, merit based and
accountable instrument for promoting good governance and better delivery of
services to the citizens. The draft Bill finalised by the Government has been modified
on the basis of the recommendations of the 2nd Administrative Reforms Commission,
contained in their 10th Report on ’Refurbishing of Personnel Administration’. A copy
of the modified draft Bill has been referred to the PMO for approval.

what religion meant to our first prime minister

India is supposed to be a religious country above everything else, and Hindu and Muslim and Sikh and others take pride in their faiths and testify to their truth by breaking heads. The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere has filled me with horror, and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seems to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition and exploitation, and the preservation of vested interests. And yet I knew well that there was something else in it, something which supplied a deep inner craving of human beings. How else could it have been the tremendous power it has been and brought peace and comfort to innumerable tortured souls? Was that peace merely the shelter of blind belief and absence of questioning, the calm that comes from being safe in harbour, protected from the storms of the open sea, or was it something more? In some cases certainly it was something more.

But organized religion, whatever its past may have been, today is largely an empty form devoid of real content. Mr. G. K. Chesterton has compared it (not his own particular brand of religion, but other!) to a fossil which is the form of an animal or organism from which all its own organic substance has entirely disappeared, but has kept its shape, because it has been filled up by some totally different substance. And, even where something of value still remains, it is enveloped by other and harmful contents. That seems to have happened in our Eastern religions as well as in the Western.