India, April 22 -- Cabinet secretary TV Somanathan has backed the lateral entry of bureaucrats as a necessity, saying the same set of generalist civil servants recruited at a young age cannot perform every task. "There will be tasks where we need to take people on lateral entry," he said in his address to bureaucrats on 17th Civil Services Day on Monday, underlining this was his personal view and not as India's top civil servant.

Somanathan called for competence and subject matter expertise among civil servants. "The era, when we thought that a good generalist could do everything, is no longer available. We are partly addressing it through our capacity-building programme and lateral entry, which I believe will be a necessity in the futur...