ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the structure and position classification of the civil service; its size and growth; central personnel agencies that manage the civil service; recruitment, selection, and performance appraisal processes; benefits and compensation; and recent reform efforts. Civil service reform is a long-standing dilemma in Bangladesh. Reforms that have been implemented since independence are mostly routine and procedural ones, keeping the basic structure and processes of civil service management intact to pre-independence period. Many reform committees/commissions were formed and all of them proposed measures to overcome these problems. Risk avoidance is another major hindrance to reform. Both politicians and bureaucrats are afraid to make mistakes while attempting to reform and this might negatively affect their careers. Bangladesh inherited a relatively modernized civil service system that was elitist in orientation, training, power, prestige, and pay, as well as being hierarchically disciplined and strictly rule-bound, and having functionally specialized cadre services, in spite of being dominated by generalists.
