A little-known facet driving India’s foreign policy has been the evolution of training protocols developed by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) for the Indian Foreign Service (IFS). The design and execution of structured training have been a discreet factor contributing to backstopping India’s external relations and enabling its global positioning. A fluid external environment requires agility and varied skills from our diplomats. This imperative also draws upon India’s unique position where we have historically shown a capability to engage diverse interlocutors and groupings, be it the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) during the Cold War or BRICS and the Quad in today’s world.
The IFS is, by its very nature, policy-driven. This distinguishes it from the field-driven orientation of sister services like the Administrative or Police cadres. This was recognised early on with the establishment of the IFS in October 1946. The Cabinet decision then noted that “The special knowledge and the professional skill required of a diplomat can only be acquired through careful training.”
Training programmes were comprehensive, and curricula were designed accordingly to equip our diplomats to represent a newly independent country. In fact, well up until the late 50s, foreign service officers were sent either to the UK or USA. As the MEA website notes, this was to enable an officer “to widen his/her social and mental horizons and not merely the acquisition of academic distinction.” The range of subjects included world history, international law, the practice of diplomacy, and a foreign language. Officers were thereafter posted at headquarters to learn the basic ropes of how the Ministry operates before their deployment to missions abroad.
The training of foreign service officers was regularly assessed with successive reviews, a practice that continues to this day. A 1961 review on the need to ensure that officers had a deeper knowledge of India led to their attachment to the Administration Training Academy (established in Mussoorie in 1959). This continues to the present, enabling inter-service interaction while the pedagogy covers subjects such as history, culture and the Constitution.
The Foundation Course
The tradition of inter-services interaction has become institutionalised through a “Foundation Course” at Mussoorie, where all new entrants into India’s civil services train together. The induction training extends beyond classroom sessions to include trekking and other life skills, activities considered to help develop one’s personality and leadership skills and inculcate a common-sense approach in dealing with professional challenges. Over time, the training methodology has been progressively modernised. The reality also is that the intake of officers has diversified beyond elite public schools and metropolitan areas. The intake now is representative of the country’s aspirational youth, drawing from both urban and rural backgrounds, government colleges and professional institutes.
The training pedagogy is designed to expose officers to their future role as administrators. Thus, there are interactive sessions with panchayati raj officials and sarpanches, members of parliament and state legislatures. Similarly, NGO representatives and social entrepreneurs, including start-ups, are invited to address the officers. Overall, this functional orientation has helped shed notions of elitism while sensitising officers to field-level expectations.
The system of a Foundation Course could be unique to the Indian bureaucracy. It enables networking across the services. Given also that one of the tasks of an Indian diplomat in missions will be inter-ministerial coordination, collegial relationships help lay the groundwork for closer inter-agency coordination.
This early socialising does come to the fore, particularly at critical times, viz., the Covid pandemic or at the time of evacuating Indians from war zones in Ukraine or Sudan. Handling evacuations requires quick response by multiple government bodies, from the Ministry of Defence to state governments. With India’s reputation as a first responder in delivering humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, as seen during the earthquake in Türkiye in 2023, such inter-ministerial coordination necessitates seamless coordination.
In the preceding decade, the Narendra Modi Government has redefined and blurred the linkages between the country’s domestic needs and their related external drivers. The leadership directive was that inter-service interaction leads to working together rather than working in silos, which has long been a bane of the civil services. The focus is on collaboration across services to foster the habit of a “whole of government” approach.
In this context there are two notable practices which have stood the IFS in good stead. These are the deployment of officers to states and districts and an attachment with the armed forces. The deployment with the armed forces is usually to the forward bases of the tri-services. Such exposure gives invaluable insights into the functioning of our armed forces and the challenges involved in safeguarding India’s vast land and maritime borders.
The training pedagogy is designed to expose officers to their future role as administrators. Thus, there are interactive sessions with panchayati raj officials and sarpanches, members of parliament and state legislatures. Similarly, NGO representatives and social entrepreneurs, including start-ups, are invited to address the officers. Overall, this functional orientation has helped shed notions of elitism while sensitising officers to field-level expectations
State attachments give officers a firsthand understanding of India at the grassroots level. Over time, they have progressed from a routine tick-mark on one’s training calendar to a deep dive into a state’s priorities. It is now mandatory for all Heads of Mission to visit states regularly.
Given the carefully weighted balance of India’s federal structure, state-level interactions give foreign service officers an opportunity to engage with policy priorities in a state. Typically, states also use this opportunity to promote their schemes and fine-tune incentives for attracting FDI, learn about emerging technologies, establish joint ventures with foreign partners, and understand protocol aspects of overseas visits. In states that have districts with international borders, such interactions facilitate effective coordination between MEA and the provinces. These inter-service processes have become critical to devising holistic national security responses relating to challenges like illegal migration, human and drug trafficking and cross-border crime.
Establishment of the Foreign Service Institute
What exactly does training entail? This question has been discussed in some detail in the MEA and continues to be so. The historical record of these discussions is captured in detail on the Ministry’s website, particularly the long-drawn-out decision leading to the establishment of a dedicated Foreign Service Institute in 1986. That this was done four decades following the creation of the IFS in 1946 is an inexplicable paradox, especially given the Ministry’s consistent emphasis on imparting proper training to its officers.
The Sushma Swaraj Institute of Foreign Service (SSIFS) in New Delhi is equipped with state-of-the-art lecture halls, language and sports facilities, and residences. Entrants to the IFS get their first exposure to the Ministryupon completion of their training in Mussoorie. An additional mandate is mid-career training of serving officers with carefully curated training programmes.
The fast-changing international environment requires a diplomat to inculcate the habit of assessing current and emerging issues. Among diplomatic training institutions, the approach is to cater to what is increasingly being referred to as “hybrid diplomacy” or “nexus diplomacy, a reference to functioning across diverse issues. These can range from purely bilateral to multilateral issues such as climate change, global pandemics, AI, and cybercrime.
Broadly, the pedagogy and training schedule for foreign service officers, from their entry as “officer trainees” to mid-career training programs, prepares an officer for each level. The training matrix is 12-14 months for entrants to a month, including institutional attachment, for serving officers. Fundamental skills such as drafting and timely filing of reports are mixed with administration, consular, protocol, and cultural duties.
Planning for crisis, dealing with complex scenarios such as wars or pandemics, anticipating black swan events, and managing social media along with associated precautions have become important training inputs. Case studies are discussed, including managing evacuations, rendering humanitarian and disaster relief, and organising multilateral events such as the 2023 G-20 Summit in New Delhi. To these are added specific modules on inter-state and multilateral negotiations, understanding the limits of functioning in an overseas mission, and developing empathy and sensitivity to local cultural norms and political cultures.
Prior to their first posting to a mission, an “officer trainee” is attached to the Ministry to get familiarised with the synergies involved in the functioning of the Ministry and Missions. This is the first exposure of the Ministry that an officer gets. Likewise, the first overseas posting is on what is called a language posting, where an officer specialises in a particular language, including the five UN languages.
An enduring issue facing an IFS officer is that of choosing to be a generalist or becoming a specialist in a particular domain. Specialisation is encouraged with the proviso that they adopt a “T” model, i.e. acquire a generalist’s ability to deal with any subject matter and, therefore, take a deep dive into the domains of disarmament or climate change, etc.
To address such a range of topics, the Institute draws on a variety of speakers, taking advantage of retired officers who share their field experiences with domain specialists from other ministries, agencies and think tanks. Classroom sessions are balanced with field visits and specialised attachments, including to the country’s cutting-edge institutions. Careful planning also goes into measuring training outcomes, with a tight feedback loop between instructors and trainees.
The overarching approach of the Institute is to prepare well-rounded officers, able to bear the responsibility of being the custodian of the national interest.
Towards Viksit Bharat
The government’s roadmap towards a Viksit Bharat by 2047 requires that the civil services transform their thinking and approach. Consequently, this has entailed a shift in methodology. The primary focus on pure human resource training has expanded to include inter-service interaction and consultation. The “National Standards of Civil Services Training Institutions” (NSCSTI) help “harmonise standards for training at Civil Services Training Institutes” (CSTI).
The result is that cross-institute sharing of resources and training methodologies is being embraced. For instance, the SSIFS collaborates with the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA) in Mussoorie, the Forest Academy in Dehradun and the Customs Academy at Palasamudram—each engagement has its own logic – collaboration with the Forest Academy can inform our climate change negotiations while linkages with the Customs Academy facilitate effective enforcement of India’s strategic export controls, tracking terrorist financing or curbing cross-border trafficking, etc.
Inter-service training fosters a habit of consultation and collaboration, which was fairly uncommon a decade ago. In fact, the need for collaboration has assumed renewed importance in line with India’s expanding global engagements, viz., the Ministry of Mines is a natural stakeholder in executing India’s membership in the Mineral Security Partnership, while the Shipping Ministry is key to the success of connectivity initiatives such as the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) and the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC).
Accordingly, training protocols at the SSIFS help sensitise officers of our Embassies as outposts of Ministries to proactively facilitate bilateral cooperation, viz, in strategic mineral resource acquisitions or high technology areas. The proposition is to match our development priorities by creating access and smoothening out bureaucratic hurdles. In terms of mechanics, officers are required to develop a habit of familiarising themselves with the government’s schemes, such as the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme, and link these to moving the country up the global value chain.
In conclusion, the focus on human resource development and training has become a key element to effective policy implementation and execution. Clearly, a policy can only be as good as its execution in achieving the desired outcomes. A frank assessment would be that there will be hits and misses, but the overall trend of IFS officers is in the right direction, and they can be expected to continue to deliver at consistently high levels as they have done so for decades. The challenge will be to borrow from Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox, whether we want our officers to be foxes or hedgehogs: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin himself is said to have later resolved this intellectual binary by saying that “Some people are neither foxes nor hedgehogs, some people are both” (as quoted in John Lewis Gaddis’ On Grand Strategy).
