Pakistan will have nearly 325 million people by 2040. Governing a country of that size, increasingly urban, connected, technologically aware and economically complex will require capabilities very different from those needed, when Pakistan inherited its administrative machinery in 1947. Yet the basic architecture of our higher civil service remains remarkably familiar: recruit some of the country's brightest young people through one competitive examination, allocate them among occupational groups, rotate generalists through widely different assignments, promote substantially through seniority, and evaluate performance through confidential annual reports. The problem is not the quality of the people entering the civil service. Many are exceptionally capable. The problem is the system into which we place them. Pakistan's civil service does not need another round of incremental reform. It needs redesign.

The starting point should be relevance. The competitive examination need not disappear, nor do the constitutional principles of open competition and regional representation need to be disturbed. What must change is the assumption that candidates can first be selected through a common process and only afterwards allocated to professions in which they may have little academic background or previous expertise.

Imagine the competitive examination being conducted in one enormous hall, but with separate sections representing the principal professional streams of government. The........

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