DND News: On August 26, 2026, 14 newborn babies were burnt alive after a fire broke out on the third floor of the Mother and Child Hospital ward at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) in Islamabad. This tragic incident raises a fundamental question: can the burning alive of 14 newborn babies finally shake the state into accepting that Pakistan’s civil administrative system has failed?
The tragedy is not merely an incident of fire or an individual institutional failure; it raises serious questions about the functioning of the state itself. Pakistan’s civil administrative system has increasingly become dysfunctional, with a bureaucratic structure that is often criticized for nepotism, political patronage, incompetence and excessive protection under the Establishment Code and service rules.
For years, Pakistanis have been discussing the need for smaller, financially and administratively independent units that can provide better governance instead of remaining trapped in political rhetoric and centralised bureaucratic control. The PIMS tragedy makes that debate even more urgent.
Pakistan has gradually reached a situation in which those who can afford it turn to private institutions for services that should fundamentally be provided by the state. People use private schools when they want better education, private hospitals when they need reliable healthcare, private security guards when they fear crime, and gated communities when they want to protect their families. In effect, many basic responsibilities of the state have been transferred to the private sector.
The burning alive of newborn children in a government hospital in the federal capital therefore raises a much larger question about the quality and accountability of public institutions. Government institutions are supposed to serve ordinary citizens, yet many of them increasingly appear more accessible to the powerful than to the public.
This should be time for government to accept that the problem is structural, not merely individual. A retired bureaucrat, when contacted, was of the view that smaller administrative units could improve accountability. However, he also stressed that smaller units alone would not solve the problem unless the service rules, appointment procedures and Establishment Code were changed. He was of the view that Pakistan needs a merit-based, accessible and accountable administrative system in which decisions are made closer to the people affected by them. Political leadership should emerge from the people, administrators should be answerable to citizens rather than merely to ministries, and governments should not be able to hide institutional failures behind complicated bureaucratic procedures.
The PIMS tragedy should therefore not end with one suspension, one inquiry or one press conference. It should force the state to examine the governance architecture that allows institutional failures to continue.
Independent governance, professional leadership, transparent and merit-based appointments, mandatory safety audits and performance-based accountability must become non-negotiable. Pakistan does not suffer from a shortage of talented professionals but its deeper problem is a system that repeatedly places bureaucratic control, political patronage and administrative convenience above competence, accountability and outcomes.
Pakistan continues to rely heavily on a system in which candidates enter through the CSS examination and are subsequently allocated to occupational groups largely according to merit ranking and preferences.
A candidate passes a competitive examination, followed by an interview and psychological assessment. A final merit list is prepared, and successful candidates are allocated to one of 12 occupational groups.
The most sought-after groups generally include the Pakistan Administrative Service, Police Service of Pakistan, Customs, Foreign Service and Office Management Group.
The problem is that professional background and specialised expertise can become secondary to cadre allocation. A doctor may become a police officer or assistant commissioner, while a physics graduate may enter the Foreign Service.
After allocation, officers undergo training and then may serve in multiple administrative fields throughout their careers.
This produces the phenomenon of the generalist administrator—an official who can move from one ministry to another and is expected to become an expert in each field.
A secretary who heads the Ministry of Finance is considered competent to manage finance, but after being transferred to the Ministry of Science and Technology or Communications, the same officer is expected to become equally capable of managing science, technology or communications.
This model may have been suitable for a colonial administrative structure designed primarily to maintain order and control. It is much harder to justify in a modern state that requires specialised expertise in technology, climate change, health, finance, energy, artificial intelligence, cyber security and complex international economics.
Pakistan’s bureaucracy also has strong resistance to changing the existing system of recruitment.
The current examination system places significant emphasis on memory, written expression and traditional examination skills. Some argue that analytical and information-processing capabilities that were once difficult to assess can increasingly be assisted by modern technologies and artificial intelligence tools.
This does not mean that competitive examinations have no value. Rather, it raises the question of whether the selection system adequately measures the skills required from administrators in the 21st century.
The resistance to bringing practitioners and subject-matter experts into senior administrative positions is another major concern. The Establishment Code, commonly known as the Esta Code, remains central to this debate. Any meaningful reform would require a review of the powers, privileges and rules that protect the existing administrative hierarchy. Will bureaucrats recommend changes to the Esta Code that could reduce their own institutional power? Or will reform once again remain limited to cosmetic changes?
The government’s own actions appear contradictory. On the one hand, political leaders repeatedly acknowledge that governance is not delivering the required results. On the other hand, the same governments continue to provide special allowances and privileges to senior bureaucrats.
Recently, the federal cabinet approved another special allowance for top bureaucracy—the second in four years—and sanctioned Rs1.8 billion for it while austerity measures remained in place and government employees received a 7% salary increase.
The decision was taken during a special cabinet meeting that approved the budget on June 12, while the Cabinet Division released details on July 17. The Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif-led cabinet approved a 7% increase in salaries for government employees and extended austerity measures into fiscal year 2026-27.
The new allowance is called the All Pakistan Services (APS) Provincial Governments’ Cadre Posts’ Parity Allowance. It follows the 150% executive allowance approved for bureaucrats by the PML-N government in June 2022. The cabinet also approved Rs1.8 billion for the allowance with effect from July 1, a figure suggesting that the allowance could be at least equal to 100% of basic pay.
A large number of retired bureaucrats, academics and administration experts have argued in articles, statements and interviews that the existing generalist CSS model is outdated and unsuitable for the requirements of modern governance.
Several reports, including those associated with international lenders such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, have highlighted governance and administrative weaknesses as factors aggravating Pakistan’s economic and security challenges. Yet meaningful reform remains elusive.
According to a report published more than two decades ago, Pakistan’s civil bureaucracy was already among the top-heaviest and expensive administrative structures in the developing world. In 2004, the government was reportedly spending nearly half a billion rupees annually on 100 frontline civil servants.
The situation has become considerably more expensive. According to a Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) report published in 2023, the estimated lifetime cost of a BPS-22 officer is around Rs869 million, while a BPS-21 officer costs approximately Rs781 million and a BPS-20 officer around Rs689 million to the public exchequer.
Pakistan Bureau of Statistics data for 2022 put the total number of federal government employees at 1,374,911. This figure includes civilians, armed forces personnel and employees of autonomous, semi-autonomous and corporate bodies.
The cost of salaries for civil bureaucracy and government employees is estimated at about Rs3 trillion, while pensions cost approximately Rs1.5 trillion. Project workers and employees of government companies and other organisations account for another estimated Rs2.5 trillion, while military wages amount to around Rs1 trillion.
These figures raise a fundamental question: what does the state receive in return for this enormous expenditure when basic public services continue to fail?
The privileges available to senior bureaucrats further illustrate the structural imbalance. A BPS-22 officer is entitled to telephone facilities with unlimited billing at both office and residence, in addition to a green telephone connection and a mobile phone with unlimited billing. Such an officer is generally entitled to two vehicles, drivers, fuel and maintenance.
In practice, an officer may use multiple vehicles from the fleet available to his ministry or department. Family members may also use official vehicles for shopping and transporting children to school.
Federal secretaries are technically not entitled to free electricity and gas, but heads of autonomous bodies and corporations are. A loophole arises because federal secretaries frequently serve as ex-officio chairmen of autonomous bodies or corporations.
Similarly, BPS-22 officers and their families are entitled to first-class medical treatment, with access to some of the country’s most expensive hospitals. A BPS-21 or BPS-22 officer may also have between eight and 15 personal staff members, cooks, drivers and runners.
The situation at the provincial level can be even more extravagant. A provincial chief secretary may have an official residence spread over 25 kanals, with a large number of servants. Some senior officials continue to live in residences that resemble the privileges associated with the colonial-era Raj.
General administration already consumes more than 9.8% of total national expenditure. Government Officers’ Residences (GORs) continue to expand at taxpayers’ expense, while at the provincial level Assistant Commissioners, Deputy Commissioners and Commissioners may have access to multiple SUVs, with each vehicle costing more than Rs20–25 million.
Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif has repeatedly expressed his desire to reform the civil administrative system.
On July 11, 2025, he again expressed his intention to revamp the system. During his earlier tenure as prime minister under the PDM government, he held a live conference with federal secretaries and criticised them for allegedly prioritising perks and privileges rather than national service. Yet such criticism did not produce the required structural transformation. The bureaucratic system continued largely along the lines of “business as usual.”
The problem is partly institutional. If the team responsible for reforming the system is itself dominated by generalist bureaucrats who have risen through the existing system, there is a risk that reform will simply reproduce the same administrative culture.
The state cannot expect a fundamentally different outcome by repeatedly placing the same institutional actors in charge of redesigning the system without changing the rules under which they operate.
The PIMS tragedy should not become another isolated chapter in Pakistan’s long history of institutional failures. The fundamental question is not simply who should be suspended after a disaster. It is why the system allowed the failure to occur and why similar failures continue to recur.
Government must stop changing the people occupying the chairs and should start changing the system that determines how those chairs are occupied, how officials exercise authority and how they are held accountable.
When systems encounter obstacles that prevent them from completing tasks within established parameters, they sometimes resort to unconventional strategies to overcome those challenges. This adaptability can produce results, but when bending rules becomes a substitute for institutional reform, it can create new ethical and administrative problems. The burning of 14 newborn babies at a government hospital in the federal capital should be more than another tragic headline. It should compel the state to confront the question it has avoided for decades.
Is Pakistan prepared to reform the system—or will it continue to mourn its failures while protecting the structure that produces them? There is little doubt that Pakistan’s bureaucratic model has become a liability. Yet successive political governments have been reluctant to fundamentally reform it because civil administrative hierarchies provide mechanisms for political appointments, postings and patronage. In such a system, competence can become secondary to connections. Bureaucracy often answers upward to ministries rather than downward to citizens, while institutional performance becomes more concerned with files, postings and protocols than actual outcomes. The problem is compounded by the fact that bureaucrats themselves are asked by ruling elite for identifying the weaknesses of the bureaucratic system and recommending reforms. This raises an obvious question: can a system effectively diagnose and reform its own structural failures when those responsible for designing the reforms are themselves beneficiaries of the faults in existing structure?
