British rule ended nearly eight decades ago; the rulers left, but much of the logic of rule remained. Pakistan inherited a bureaucratic structure designed to administer subjects, not to serve citizens. Its only purpose was order, extraction, revenue collection and control, with a main focus on hierarchy, obedience, and procedural discipline. Today, Pakistan faces a different nature of problems: digital transformation, climate change, energy insecurity, and increasingly complex public-service demands, yet the administrative setup remains rooted in the colonial era. Therefore, Civil service reforms are the need of this modern era, and Pakistan can not afford the delay.
In September 2024, the prime minister constituted the committee on Civil Service Reforms. Again, in July last year, the prime minister established a second committee for further deliberations. It took the committee 2 years to come up with the recommendations; however, the important step, implementation, is still pending. The timing for implementation of those recommendations could hardly be more urgent. The federal Civil Service Reforms Committee has apparently reached consensus on 43 recommendations after almost two years of debate. What's more revealing is the government's own findings: poor domain knowledge, mismatch between qualifications and postings, a lack of correlation between performance and career progression, poor digital and data skills, slow decision-making, weak implementation capacity, leadership gaps. The committee has noted that the current structure is rooted in a colonial legacy and was last redesigned in 1973.
The British Empire left behind an administration system which was not designed around the principles of serving citizens. British India had to have a strong bureaucracy to establish order, collect taxes, and govern such a large population from above. Pakistan’s National Commission for Government Reforms report of 2008 acknowledged this directly: the country inherited a formidable “steel frame”, but one built for purposes very different from the needs of an independent state. Colonial inheritance is not destiny.
Britain itself did not preserve its traditional administrative system; rather, various reforms have been introduced from time to time according to the needs and demands of the changing era. The Fulton Report of 1968 criticised the dominance of generalist civil servants and suggested greater specialist expertise and authority. Later, the Next Steps reforms focused on creating agencies with clearer responsibilities to serve citizens through service delivery, while subsequent reforms strengthened merit-based recruitment and specialist capabilities. This process continues through the 2024–27 Civil Service People Plan, new performance standards, and the 2026 National School of Government and Public Services, which focuses on skills related to digital technology, data, and artificial intelligence. Britain still faces bureaucratic challenges, but it treats civil service reform as a continuous process rather than a one-time exercise. In Pakistan, on the other hand, much of the administrative structure still follows the colonial model.
The objective is not to dismantle the state’s administrative spine, but to strengthen it based on expertise, performance, accountability and service.
The lesson for Pakistan is not to copy Whitehall. It is to copy the habit of continuous institutional adaptation. Instead of spending 2 years only on compiling the recommendations, the government could have implemented the most urgent and widely agreed reforms in phases as the deliberations progressed. The following reforms should be implemented on a priority basis, because they address the core issues of bureaucracy with long-term impacts.
First, the recruitment process needs to shift its focus from generalist entry to domain-based and cluster-based entry. High scores on a general exam do not guarantee expertise in energy, digital policies, or health administration. When officers are assigned to a specific position or specialty, qualifications, aptitude, and experience should play a role. Pakistan’s reform commission had already called for a better balance between generalists and specialists. The government should seriously consider cluster-based recruitment.
Second, an officer’s initial posting or cadre allocation shouldn’t decide how far they can progress in their career. The appointment of officers to senior positions should be done increasingly based on a fair and open competition between qualified officers and, where appropriate, external experts, based on a publication of job requirements. Specialists should have a clear path to senior leadership positions.
Third, promotion must reward performance, not merely the passage of time. Senior officials should receive clear objectives, reasonable tenure to deliver them, and consequences for persistent underperformance. Frequent politically driven transfers make accountability almost meaningless: an officer cannot own an outcome if he/she does not remain long enough to produce it. Pakistan’s reform commissions have been warning about precisely this problem for years.
Fourth, digitization shouldn’t mean just scanning old files into a computer; it should mean redesign. Data analysis, digital literacy, and AI literacy should become core capabilities, while unnecessary layers of approval should be removed. Britain’s experience is useful here not because its digital state is perfect—it is not but because it has treated digital capacity as an important institutional skill rather than simply the purchase of IT.
The present committee for Civi Service Reforms therefore has a much more challenging task than just identifying the issues and making another technically impressive report. Commissions and reform committees aren't new in Pakistan. The issue is not lack of expertise in identifying the problem; it is resistance, political interference and loss of momentum. PIDE’s work and Pakistan’s own reform history show how often substantially similar problems have been identified without fundamentally changing the system. Civil-service reform should not be considered an attack on civil servants. It should provide a system that will incentivize capable officers to acquire expertise and that will safeguard their professional performance and their service to citizens. Pakistan should not enter the next decade governed by assumptions that were made for subjects rather than citizens. The objective is not to dismantle the state’s administrative spine, but to strengthen it based on expertise, performance, accountability and service.