The Foreign Service Journal, June 2014

28 JUNE 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Happily, MEA has never adopted such buzzwords of corpo- rate management as “balanced score-cards,” “key performance indicators” and “performance contracts,” which unfortunately blight some diplomatic services in developing countries like Botswana, Kenya, Malaysia and Tunisia. But it does need to set up permanent machinery for inspections of embassies and rigorously enforce procedures, whether they involve develop- ment of “annual plans” by missions or ‘“handing over notes”’ by ambassadors at the end of their term. Under MEA’s “Development Partnership Administration” process (an umbrella unit established in 2012 to implement an expanded aid program that now takes India’s external aid contribution to around 0.2 percent of gross domestic product), embassies also manage aid and have responded well to the new responsibilities. Training processes at the Indian Foreign Service Institute have expanded and improved, driven by reform across the entire civil service—especially a decision that all officials must attend special courses before they cross career milestones. But more focused training for the IFS is still needed to strengthen profes- sional competence; and this requires MEA to develop its own course materials, simulations and scenarios. At heart this involves MEA closely managing its Foreign Service Institute, tuning management of the FSI more closely to the ministry’s functional needs. Language training also needs to be strengthened to develop specialized skills in such languages such as Arabic and Russian, to match the inter- preter-level expertise that has been developed in recent years in Chinese. The Future Retired officials are given to nostalgia and easy prognostica- tion on what they often see as declining standards in the institu- tion where they had worked. I was closely involved with training IFS recruits from 1996 to 2008, and saw in the new entrants Indian ambassadorial appointments are almost exclusively from the Indian Foreign Service cadre.