Apex pettiness

 

Till very late in the IPS career, I didn’t know about the most important reason or purpose, the raison d'être for a civil servant’s existence, which is attaining the apex scale. This particular hallowed endowment is allowed only at the very top when one hits the level of Secretary to government of India, Chief Secretary in states and a few select DGPs in my service. 

When I was holding the post of a mere joint secretary in government of India and, by a set of fortuitous circumstances, managed to be assigned to hold the post of a DGP, I saw a file when previously another Joint Secretary level officer in the IAS had been similarly assigned (for a short while); he had moved the file to be given the same salary as that of the DGP whose post he was temporarily holding, and was granted the same. Lo and behold, the post carried that apex scale! So I moved the same file, with the same reasoning. 

The file went to my Ministry, then DoPT, then MHA and I was granted the coveted Apex scale. Then the file moved down to me through all those channels and I felt good. The Secretary retired. I was seeking to build a good, working relation with the new Secretary. Things were going well until I had to visit a foreign country on official work. For the political clearance, I had to fill up a form. It was a routine thing. However, when this Secretary saw the pay column and “Apex scale” written there, he saw red. 

He asked his colleagues how come a mere joint secretary level officer was getting the same scale which he had attained after long toil, asked my office for the file, went through the contents and went ballistic. His colleagues tried to inform him that it was all examined at various levels and in three different departments and was as per the rules. Despite this, the discomfort of the Secretary was so much that while allowing me to visit abroad, he erroneously ordered that all my perks would be as per my original scale. It didn’t make any difference but I thought that would make him happy. However, he continued to be agitated. I was told that he wrote a Demi Official letter to various authorities to cancel the “abominable” grant. Apparently, it took him 10 full days to draft that letter, crossing out a comma here, making a word bold there, and so on. Despite all this, the replies came back upholding the earlier decision. 

The Secretary called up many of his counterparts to annihilate this “anomaly” but didn’t get anywhere. It became so much the talk of the town that whenever I attended any party of civil servants and was introduced to anyone, the first response was, “Oh, B.B. Dash, you’re getting the apex scale?!” 

Probably, the Secretary felt “thwarted” or something but, try as I might, our relations never recovered after that. In all my Performance Appraisal Reports, I always used to fill in only quantified targets and achievements. I had exceeded all the various targets. The Secretary had to agree because they were hard facts. However, he wrote, “these were achieved because of close supervision by the ministry.” With that, he justified a sub-Outstanding grade, knowing fully well that that would kill my chances of promotion. However, the Minister saw this and overruled him and put me at the highest of the outstanding points. 

An Apex scale can create quite a heartburn. 

Guess what, that apex scale as of today is a basic pay of Rs. 2,25,000 and those days, it was just Rs. 80,000. That’s all. Considering the pay and perks I’d walked out on by quitting the corporate sector for the civil services, I was really amused by it all. The amount involved was paltry. The Secretary was petty. On an epic apex scale.