Do civil servants really serve? An AC answers honestly

A father’s retirement and a first-attempt pass

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Ibrahim Arbab, the Assistant Commissioner of Model Town in Lahore, into the studio. Within the first few exchanges, two facts establish the shape of the conversation. Ibrahim is twenty-nine. He has been in the District Management Group for almost two years. And his father, Arbab Shahzad, was a decorated civil servant who retired in 2017 and now advises the Prime Minister.

Ibrahim grew up in Peshawar, did his O-levels at Beaconhouse there, moved to Islamabad for A-levels at the Margalla campus, and — in a coincidence Muzamil flags on air — was in the same school batch as the host. He stayed in Pakistan for university because his older brother was already abroad and he wanted to remain with his parents, taking an external degree from University College Islamabad.

The decision to attempt CSS came from watching his father. “He was in the twilight of his career,” Ibrahim says. “He was going to retire in 2017. So I had a chance to give the exam in 2016. I said, why not? It’ll be the best retirement gift for him.” He cleared it on the first attempt. The month his father retired, Ibrahim joined the service.

The pressure of carrying the name is something he speaks about directly. Cousins were calling him “AC sahib” before he had even sat the exam. Friends and batchmates gossiped. One rumour circulating at the time claimed he had sat his CSS exam in his own drawing room — a story he calls “as far away from factual reality as you can get.” His response is steady: “If you’re working and you don’t really care what people say, it’s fine.”

The 2016 batch, he notes, was an unusual one. It was the lowest-scoring year in recent memory. Pakistani newspapers ran the predictable hand-wringing about the education system. But the operational consequence was distinctive — written-qualified candidates were fewer than the available seats, and almost everyone who passed written got inducted into a group.

What an AC actually does

Muzamil asks the obvious question: what is an AC’s mandate? Ibrahim’s answer is the line he heard repeatedly at the academy from visiting seniors. “Everything under the sun is the AC’s jurisdiction.” He laughs at the Lion King echo of the phrase, then explains the literal version.

The formal role is revenue. The Assistant Commissioner is the sub-divisional collector, head of the tehsil (called a taluka in Sindh). Land revenue, water rates, the newly introduced agricultural income tax, mutation fees when a piece of land changes hands — all of it flows through the AC’s office. That is the job description on paper.

The rest of the role is supervisory and it is open-ended. ACs supervise polio teams going door to door. They oversee dengue vaccinations. They report up to the deputy commissioner, who is accountable to the province. If a building is going up on the wrong setback, that is technically LDA or CDA territory, but the complaint usually reaches the AC’s office anyway. “We are basically the representatives of the government,” Ibrahim says. “We are accessible to the people. Whatever department’s problem it is, they come to us. Then we sort those things out for them.”

The training pipeline is longer than most people realise. After clearing CSS, there is the Common Training Program, then the Specialized Training Program at the DMG-specific campus on Mall Road in Lahore — nine months for DMG officers alone. After that comes an under-training posting in the field as an AC-UT. The academy still holds the leash. Six months in, the academy decides whether the trainee is fit to continue. “Till then you’re totally on the edge,” Ibrahim says.

Two years in Hyderabad

His first proper posting was as AC in Hyderabad, Sindh. He calls it “probably the best two years of my life.” Muzamil presses on this — both because of the policy question of how the urban north sees Sindh, and because of the genuine curiosity of someone who grew up in Peshawar and Islamabad arriving in a city he had never lived in.

Ibrahim describes a culture of immediate welcome. The Sindhi tradition of presenting an ajrak and a topi to a newcomer meant that within his first week he had several hundred ajraks stacked in his room. “I was thinking I’m running an online business,” he jokes. The work itself ran at a similar register. “If I made one percent of effort, people would cherish it and appreciate it so much that I felt like working much harder.” Hyderabad, he is keen to emphasise, is a developed city. The brands and restaurants are there. The infrastructure is real.

Muzamil pushes into the harder version of the question. From the air, the difference between an Islamabad approach and a Karachi approach is stark — greenery gives way to barren land. The conventional story attaches economic hardship to crime. Ibrahim’s answer is more granular. The dacoit problem was real on some routes in the past, but it is not the lived experience of Hyderabad. The Multan-to-Sukkur motorway is now fully fenced and secured. What was once an unimaginable road journey is now five or six hours.

The image problem of Sindh outside Karachi, in his reading, is a road problem. “Image will only get better if people go there. If you only listen to stories, it can never improve.” Until rail and road connect the smaller cities, the vacuum stays filled by whatever stories travel best. He points at specific places: the historic Makli graveyard near Hyderabad, Keenjhar Lake, the duck and deer hunting circuits that already attract visitors from the Gulf. “If that lake was anywhere near Islamabad, Instagram stories would be running on it day and night.” Distance does the rest.

Lahore Model Town and the seven-day week

His current posting is Assistant Commissioner of Model Town, Lahore. He calls it tough and promising in the same breath. The tehsil covers Gulberg, Main Boulevard, Jail Road, Garden Town, the older posh societies of Lahore. Model Town Society itself dates to 1947 — when he visited its office he saw board listings of presidents from 1915 and 1916.

The day starts early and rarely ends before nine in the evening. Weekends are working days. “There are no weekdays and weekends in the big metropolitan cities,” he says. A protest on a road, a VIP visit, rain that needs draining, all of it lands on the AC. Five ACs cover all of Lahore alongside one DC — a number Muzamil flags as startlingly low for a city of roughly sixteen million.

Model Town tehsil starts at Ichhra Market and runs to the border of Kasur. The population estimate Ibrahim offers is around four million within the tehsil alone. There is a live debate, he confirms, about dividing Lahore administratively. The current setup is straining at the seams.

The growth of Lahore over the last two decades comes up next. Muzamil notes that Karachi-based commentary tends to oversell it; Ibrahim makes the case for why the migration is real. Banking, media, corporate, industry — every sector is concentrated there. Rural-to-urban migration, he agrees, brings cultural mixing rather than cultural friction. He does not see the cultural-imbalance argument holding up in his experience. “Pakistanis live happily together,” he says. “That’s not the case.”

Crime is not our job

One of the sharper moments in the conversation is a correction Ibrahim makes early in the urbanisation segment. Muzamil’s question assumes crime sits under the AC’s umbrella. Ibrahim interrupts cleanly. “Crime is not our domain. We’re administrative officers. It’s totally the domain of police.”

He clearly wants to say this on record. “Usually we get complaints about — robbery happened, AC sahib kya kar raha hai? Murder happened, AC sahib kya kar raha hai? He’s not doing anything. It’s not our domain. It’s totally police.” This is one of the lines in the conversation that does the most work. It reframes a large slice of public criticism aimed at his cadre as misdirected — addressed to the wrong door.

The substance behind the line is the broader devolution argument he comes back to later. The DMG group used to hold a great deal more authority than it does now. That authority has been redistributed across departments, autonomous bodies, and the judiciary. “Expectation is the same,” he says, “but the authority is not.”

The federal and provincial track

Muzamil asks the question that often confuses CSS aspirants — what is the actual difference between a federal officer through CSS and a provincial officer through the provincial civil service exam, if both end up as ACs and DCs in the same districts? Ibrahim’s answer is unsentimental.

The only material difference is mobility. A provincial officer cannot leave the province. A CSS officer is liable to be posted anywhere in Pakistan. Progression through grades is faster on the federal track — Ibrahim is in his second year of grade 17, and expects to move to grade 18 next year if things go well. Provincial officers spend longer in each grade. The Chief Secretary of every province is always a CSS officer. The roles in the field are otherwise identical. He is generous about the calibre of provincial officers and pushes back on any suggestion that the federal track confers personal superiority. “It’s not that they are less than CSS officers. Every province has developed its own system, and I think they’re right to.”

Horizontal versus vertical and the limits of planning

When Muzamil asks whether cities should grow up or out, Ibrahim does not give the conventional urbanist answer. He grounds it in what he saw in Hyderabad. A road, a drain, a water supply line, a sewerage system — all of it is planned for the population the area had when the road was laid. The pipe does not get bigger because the building above it now has twenty floors instead of one.

“Don’t you think the same road and the same drain and the same water supply line will face extra pressure?” he asks. “That’s how these problems start — gandagi, nalas closed, gutters closed, water not coming.” Vertical growth, in his framing, is only feasible if planning is done for triple or twenty times the current load. In a developing country context, he sees horizontal expansion as more realistic — not as an ideal, but as a function of how rarely fifty-year planning actually happens.

On Twitter, photo-ops, and the question itself

Muzamil raises the recurring Twitter criticism that civil servants spend more time taking photographs of their work than doing it. He flags his own bias — he likes the visibility, it tells him what the administration is actually doing — but invites Ibrahim to respond as someone on the receiving end.

Ibrahim’s answer is measured. Things have changed. The civil service that existed twenty years ago could not have evolved without changing. The platform is, on balance, useful for complaint resolution — he cites Hamza Shahbaz Shafqaat as a senior officer who uses Twitter precisely this way, posting complaints and the resolutions side by side. “Maybe some people do photo-ops more than work,” he concedes. “But that doesn’t mean they should be banned from taking photographs. People have put civil servants in too tight a box.”

This leads naturally into the conversation’s title question, which Muzamil asks bluntly later in the episode. The word “servant” in “civil servant,” he points out, carries a connotation in Pakistan that does not flatter anyone. Do civil servants actually serve?

Ibrahim answers in the form of a day. He wakes up and checks health teams. He runs price control as a magistrate — a duty he had forgotten to mention earlier, and which is one of the AC’s daily statutory responsibilities. He oversees vaccination centres and the COVID SOP enforcement that has reoriented the cadre’s role since 2020. “Twelve to fourteen hours a day, every civil servant works, no matter where he is posted. If he doesn’t do that, he gets transferred, or he gets a bad ACR from his senior.” The answer he lands on is straightforward: “Civil servants actually serve a lot. More than people expect.”

The seventies generation and the new lot

Muzamil asks Ibrahim to compare his cohort with the seniors who came in during the seventies and eighties — the generation that is now retiring. Ibrahim is respectful but does not flatten the comparison.

The older generation, he says, were extraordinarily thorough on laws and rules. They could lecture on any rule book at a moment’s notice. But the rules they internalised no longer apply cleanly to current problems — “they don’t apply to different things because they have become old.” The newer cohort improvises. It uses different techniques. It works under a public visibility that the older generation simply did not face. “In those days they couldn’t be criticised. They didn’t have a platform. Now if you do one thing wrong, the next day you’ll be on the headline.”

He is generous about the educational backgrounds of new entrants — LUMS, NUST, IBA, foreign-educated candidates. He acknowledges the macro argument that this reflects a job market with too few private-sector options. But the net effect on the cadre, in his view, is positive. “It’s good for CSS. The new lot is very well equipped. They just need to be trained properly.”

Asked plainly: who do you look up to?

When Muzamil asks for the hero names of the cadre, Ibrahim pauses and asks if he would be blamed for naming his father. Muzamil tells him to go ahead. The other name he offers is Hamza Shahbaz Shafqaat, who he describes as reorienting the role of the DC. Muzamil adds Kamran Lashari, who Ibrahim confirms is currently head of the Walled City Authority in Lahore — they cross paths professionally now. The names are not a list. They are a way of saying that the cadre still has people worth modelling oneself on.

He is also honest about the limit of mentorship. The seniors can teach principle, dedication, hard work. They cannot teach how the job is done today. “How to do the job, we have to figure out. You learn yourself.”

2050, and the country he wants to retire into

Muzamil closes with the question he asks every guest. Ibrahim is twenty-nine. He will retire around 2050. What does he hope the country looks like by then?

His answer focuses on the variables a civil servant in a policy-making role would actually care about. He hopes Pakistan has settled its issues with its neighbours, because the geographic accident of bordering Afghanistan, India, and Iran has cost the country dearly. He hopes terrorism is genuinely a thing of the past. He hopes the economy is prospering — “the most important thing.” He hopes the provinces are well connected to each other and that no province feels neglected. “All the people of Pakistan should feel they are one, and nobody is neglected. They are all treated the same.”

By the end of the conversation, the answer to the episode’s title question is not a slogan. It is a description of the work, the constraints around the work, and the gap between what the public expects and what the cadre is now empowered to deliver. Whether that counts as service is, in Ibrahim’s framing, a question of whether you are willing to look at the day, rather than the headline.