Revolving chair

The Uttar Pradesh government under chief minister Akhilesh Yadav is yet to settle down. Observers attribute the confusion to the young CM being unable to run his administration without interference from the many power centres, including his father Mulayam Singh Yadav, in the Samajwadi Party. So UP continues to witness a revolving chair spectacle of babus being shunted around routinely or their transfers being cancelled.

Babus are worried not just at the scale of the adminis .....

Waiting for PM

Is there an administrative delay or is the government too busy fighting political fires to bother about filling two vacancies of information commissioners at the Central Information Commission (CIC)? According to sources, the decision has been pending for months simply because Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Ms Sushma Swaraj the leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha have been unable to meet to take the decision.

Meanwhile, RTI activists and others have been concerned at th .....

Tug of war

A rather lengthy tussle has been going on between the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and chief minister Raman Singh of Chattisgarh over an IAS officer currently posted as additional secretary in the PMO.

B.V.R. Subramaniam, a 1987 batch officer from Chattisgarh has been on what is being termed as an unusually long deputation to the Centre – 12 years to be precise. During this period he has been private secretary to the Prime Minister, done a stint at the World Bank, and is again .....

It’s Army vs IPS
The ministry of home affairs (MHA) has been looking to recruit some 600 Indian Police Service (IPS) officers it needs to make up for the shortfall in recruitment. Since the armed and paramilitary forces seems like a pretty good catchment area for recruiting police officers, MHA has issued new guidelines which will allow serving officers to do a stint in the police service. The decision has the blessings of the minister P. Chidambaram. Still the home babus are approaching the is .....

Domestic ties

The trend of retired IAS officers picking up jobs in the information commissions continues unabated, despite cries of protests from civil activists. In Haryana, according to sources, chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda has cleared the appointment of newly retired chief secretary Urvashi Gulati for appointment as state information commissioner. The chief information commissioner of state also happens to be a former IAS officer, Naresh Gulati. He had resigned from the civil servi .....

Change of guard

The change of guard in Uttar Pradesh, predictably, means large scale transfers of babus. UP’s bureaucracy, after all, is divided along political lines. So within hours of Akhilesh Yadav taking over as the new chief minister, officers who held key positions in the BSP government were moved out and Samajwadi Party “loyalists” brought in. The new government has cleared the appointment of Jawed Usmani as the Chief Secretary of Uttar Pradesh. He will be the first Muslim chief secre .....

A grand design

The India Design Forum held in Delhi recently epitomizes the new India. By combining the refinement of design, expanding the very horizon of its application and appreciation, the Forum puts into place, one more essential brick in the gradual transformation of India into the Next Generation service economy. It was the first attempt to enthuse the narrow base of India’s designer community with the best-in-class global examples from across the world – again a trigger point for wha .....

Tied to the job

Rajasthan’s high-flying babus have become more earth-bound after the state government’s efforts to control and regulate expenditure. Apparently, the government wants to check the growing tendency of senior babus to leave on foreign trips without obtaining prior sanction. But now a circular issued by additional chief secretary C.K. Mathew of the department of finance lays down the do’s and don’ts that babus need to follow. And to ensure compliance, Mr Mathew has warned official .....

Ready to desert?

Are bureaucrats in Uttar Pradesh sensing a regime change after the assembly elections? The buzz in Lucknow’s babudom is not just about vote shares, seats and party performances. Observers there have noted that several high-profile bureaucrats, including chief secretary Anoop Mishra, additional Cabinet secretary Ravindra Singh and principal secretary to chief minister Mayawati, R.P. Singh, have put in requests for Central deputation. Others in the swiftly growing queue include .....

Food for thought

There are no free lunches, literally, in Union Minister for rural development Jairam Ramesh’s domain. The minister who strives to strike a different note has launched a vigorous austerity drive in his ministry and its associated departments. In the minister’s crosshair now is the Council for Advancement of People’s Action and Rural Technology (CAPART), which operates out of tony India Habitat Centre and has regional offices across the country. Sources say that CAPART is at th .....

Missing signature

If you ever wondered why the ‘war against corruption’ more often than not hits a brick wall, it might be worthwhile to consider this episode. More than three years ago, the Central Board for Direct taxes (CBDT) initiated departmental action against 30 revenue officials, but the issue has not progressed for want of the finance minister’s signature on the chargesheets.

Consequently, the chargesheets were quashed by the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT). Interestingly Su .....

All bark, no bite?

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) succeeds where the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) failed! The CBI recently arrested central excise commissioner Anup Kumar Srivastava for his alleged role in a tax evasion case. This followed a raid by CBI on Mr Srivastava’s premises earlier this month. But the curious thing about this episode is that Mr Srivastava was already on the radar of the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC), which had recommended that the official be tran .....

A rare joy

Whistleblowers among the tribesmen (yes, that rare breed still exists) rarely find their careers sailing smoothly, even in these enlightened days where the cry for accountability and transparency is shaking babu bastions. Ask Sanjiv Chaturvedi, a lowly Indian Forest Officer in Haryana, who clearly rubbed the powers that be the wrong way during his five year tenure in the state forest department. For exposing irregularities and violations of the Wildlife Act, the forest babu suffere .....

Hectic political activity seems to have eclipsed everything else in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh. But the usual business of babudom continues amid the election din. Chief Minister Mayawati’s relationship with her babus has been prickly at best, especially with those who have refused to kowtow to her wishes. In September the state’s senior-most IAS officer Promilla Shankar, who was posted as commissioner in the NCR region cell found herself suspended for invoking Behanji’s ire. As reported earlier in .....