Mains Practice Questions

Approach

• Start with briefly explaining what you mean by the ethical dilemmas.
• Discuss how domain knowledge is necessary to public officials.
• Discuss the need for innovativeness and creativity of a high order in order to resolve ethical dilemmas.

Introduction

Public organisations need to innovate to achieve higher levels of output with decreased levels of input, in accordance with the focus put on efficiency. The changing societies require new or improved services, which the digital era has fulfilled with its increased expectations for service delivery.

Body

Domain knowledge does helps during the service period, which can be concluded so by

• Domain expertise in civil servants helps in improving quality of decisions and service delivery, thus promoting public trust.
• It helps to understand nuances and dynamics of a particular field that helps in resolving clashes between conflicting values.
• Government functions have evolved overtime and require a more specialised and sophisticated approach.
• System of domain expertise also promotes merit, efficiency, objectivity while reducing reliance on outside expert consultation.

But, merely having domain expertise is not sufficient in all cases. Innovativeness and creativity are also required for resolving ethical dilemmas. The public service is a multi-facet delivery system, and thus requires out of the box ideas.

• A civil servant with creativity and innovation helps in identifying the right kind of data and advice for effective policy formulation. For example, Avaneesh Awasthi, through his skills and ideas is making Uttar Pradesh an investment hub.
• Having out of box solutions helps in reconciling diverging values and actions to resolve ethical dilemmas. For example, use of ICT during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Solving emerging interdisciplinary problems while working under different constraints requires innovation. For example, the problem of bad loans is rooted in economic slowdown, willful defaults, politics-business nexus and inability of banks to assess risk.

Conlusion

Thus, it can be concluded that both domain expertise and creativity are important quality assets of a public servant. In order to advance, one needs both complementing each other in the long run.