The Great Civl Services Examination debate

For the past two days during our long commute to office, my wife and me are having quite an interesting and heated debate on whether the selection process for civil servants in India is in consonance with the requirements of public service or not.
Being an MBA and having gone through assessment centers, I can draw a parallel between the process for hiring the right candidate for the given job. If you want to hire for finance, you look for a different qualification while for an operations job you look for a whole different skill set. Therefore you define the job requirements and the skills required to perform that particular job and the selection process is fine tuned accordingly.
In any field of public service, the question really is the same of that of attracting the right man for the service. However, the process currently seems to be that of choosing the best among the applicants. If I were to look at the skills required to be a successful district administrator and to be a successful taxman, I would have reasons to believe that the two have to be vastly different. But, somehow people with anthropology and sociology as electives and a medicine background become taxman as well as forest officers or even a cop.
My wife is of the view that the current system tests a person comprehensively on some traits (mentioned below) and anyone who proves his/her metal on these is worthy enough of being a public servant irrespective of his/her individual preferences and job requirements. The deficit in a person’s skills and job requirement is more than compensated or rather bridged through the training process that follows after exams, she argues.
Exams and Interview tests a person on:
1. Ability to delve deeper in a subject;
2. Ability to work hard;
3. Ability to excel in a highly competitive environment;
4. General knowledge and awareness; and
5. Presence of mind
I do not ,for a moment, have any doubt on the talent and ability of these people but I somehow cannot imagine someone with Pali language and Physics as electives and an engineering background being selected for a district administrator role without any other additional personality and aptitude tests. In addition to the technical knowledge of the Constitution, Political Structure, Law and Order mechanism, Civil Bodies functioning and other such areas, a successful administrator has to have a genuine desire to serve, an equally genuine liking for people, common sense, compassion, a sense of humor and certain leadership qualities such as initiative, courage, intelligence and, of course, the ability to make quick decisions. None of the stages of today’s process tests a person on these requirements.
Even if I were to take the quality of training process post examination at the face value and believe that the same can make any able and talented person fit for a job, I wonder how can it create a genuine desire for that same job. For a person to be motivated enough to perform his/her duties, a genuine desire for that job is a must. Someone aspiring to become an administrator all through his/her life becomes a forest officer or a policeman and no one complains!
Instead of cracking our brains on the pros and cons of allowing or not allowing IIT graduates, engineers, doctors and other professionals to take the civil services examination, we ought to be much more concerned about the basic issue of restructuring the existing selection machinery, as also the terms and conditions of the services, in such a way that we are able to attract not only the best but the right type of candidates, representing all sections of society and all disciplines in sync with the job requirements.
I don’t know if the debate between us is settled yet but in an era when the expectations from the entire state machinery is very high, we have got to get the system right in every respect to enable all round development.