Wednesday, May 03, 2017

Culture of bouquets, protocol, subordinates receiving senior officers should also end with red beacons: Air India CMD Ashwani Lohani

ON May 1, red beacon culture came to an end, officially. A number of sections under 108 rule (use of red, white and blue light) of the Central Motor Vehicles Rules, 1989 were deleted to ensure that no politician or bureaucrat can use red beacons atop their vehicles. Air India chairman and managing director and 1980 batch Indian Railway Service of Mechanical Engineering (IRSME) officer Ashwani Lohani said on Monday that…
the VIP culture always disturbed him since the time he had joined bureaucracy. In a Facebook post posted on Monday, the senior bureaucrat went beyond the red beacon to argue that the culture of officials accepting and expecting “bouquets, special arrangements, protocol, slew of subordinates to receive and see off and to top it all gifts and freebies” must also end along with red beacons. “A reminder of the raj era, such conduct that diverts focus away from deliverance would hopefully also diminish considerably”, he wrote in his Facebook post. His Facebook posts are public which means his posts can be read by people who are not his friends. Praising the recent decision of ending the red beacon, he also added that the increasing emphasis on value systems was indeed a matter of great satisfaction.Lohani is the author of “Turnaround Excellence” and had earlier helped turning around Madhya Pradesh tourism among others.
On Sunday, Prime Minister in his radio programme Mann Ki Baat, emphasized how there exists an atmosphere of disdain towards the VIP culture, acknowledging that the VIP culture runs very deep and the red beacon over the years became the symbol of that culture. “Experience tells us that whereas the red beacon used to be fixed atop the vehicle, atop the car, slowly and steadily it permeated into the psyche and got firmly entrenched in the mindset. The red beacon now has gone for good but nobody can say with certainty that the same in the mindset has also disappeared”, PM said in his talk.

2 comments:

  1. its most prevalent in railways . some railway drm and gm go around with cavalcade bigger than any CM

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  2. It is good for India that Shri Ashwani Lohani left Indian Railways and joined Indian Airlines.

    Indian Railways is a highly bureaucratic organisation with a ........ future.

    ReplyDelete