PM Modi interacts with American CEOs: “Is PM exhorting bureaucracy to be more supportive of industry”

On PM's arrival in New York on Sep 23 

PRIME Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday evening will interact with CEOs from financial sector organizations including JP Morgan and Blackstone, during a round-table meeting in New York City. The other American companies that will feature during the meeting include Lockheed Martin, Ford, IBM, Pepsi, GE, Boeing and MasterCard, among others. As the PM will pitch for more investments into India, the question that is likely to be posed is whether…

Who are the MPs wishing to know more about bureaucracy? And replies they received

Whither Bureaucracy? Civil servants cleaning a lawn

MORE and more Members of Parliament, most of whom belonging to the ruling BJP, want to know more about bureaucracy. If questions asked in Lok Sabha are any indication, those MPs, many of whom are first-timers, want to know whether IAS, IPS or IRS officers have resigned to join private sector, or whether the government changed the formats in which civil servants need to submit their assets and liabilities post Lokpal Act. Here are 5 such MPs, their questions and what replies they had received from the government:

Vodafone CEO describes Indian bureaucracy “complicated and stratified”

VODAFONE Group CEO Vittorio Colao has called Indian bureaucracy “very complicated and stratified” adding that there are “just too many layers and too many people who can interpret things the wrong way.” The CEO of the British telecom giant made this remark while speaking to The Wall Street Journal, the largest circulated financial daily in the world, just a few days before India’s finance minister P Chidambaram presented his Union budget. And the context in which Colao referred to Indian bureaucracy was...

Obama In India: Is U.S. really frustrated with Indian bureaucracy?

JUST ahead of U.S. president’s Barack Obama’s high-profile three-day-long visit to India beginning Saturday, a noted American author and former official during Jimmy Carter administration, has said the U.S. is frustrated with Indian bureaucracy. While talking to Rediff.com, Michael Krepon, a co-founder of the Stimson Centre and former official of U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency talked about bureaucratic bottlenecks in India.

He further said that Indians today have great frustration over bureaucracy. “The United States has great frustration with the Indian bureaucracy. I understand Indians also have great frustration with Indian bureaucracy, but it is very hard to change patterns of behaviour from the past even though the situation today is so much different from the Cold War,” he told to popular online media, Rediff.com.

Obama is expected to pressurize Indian policy makers to change rules in India and give more market access to American companies. One of the main agenda that US president may take up during his visit is opening up of multi-brand retail for foreign companies, for which DIPP came out with a draft discussion paper a few months ago. US company Wal Mart among others are expected to gain from the move.

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Four bureaucrats to assist PM during Obama visit

Group "A" telecom officers set to help TCIL’s African safary

The Union Cabinet has given its nod to the proposal of the department of telecommunications regarding deputation of Group “A” officers of department of telecommunications (DoT) to Telecommunications Consultants India Ltd. (TCIL).

The approval is to allow TCIL to fill up such number of posts on deputation from Group “A” officers of DoT for a period of three years with effect from October 1, 2010 according to DPE guidelines.

The senior officials are expected to help TCIL in executing the time-bound project of Pan-African e-Network and other ongoing overseas and domestic projects. 

Minister Dinesh Trivedi says college kids would do better in health ministry than bureaucrats

IN WHAT could be described as the harshest criticism of bureaucracy by an Indian politician in a television interview during recent time, minister of state for health Dinesh Trivedi, a senior Trinamool Congress leader, termed Indian bureaucrats “ineffective” and suggested the need for secretary level officers to visit villages with Members of Parliament to have some sense of accountability.
He went ahead to say that college kids would run the health ministry better than the bureaucrats. (Read: Who is India’s health secretary K Sujatha Rao?)

“Why do we have to wait for the CBI to unearth them (about scams like Medical Council of India)? Where is the accountability for bureaucracy? Politicians are accountable as they have to go back to the people,” he said in an interview with CNN-IBN news channel.

And that’s not all. Mr Trivedi further said that bureaucrats are not innovative, and that’s a major roadblock. “They don’t understand technology. Young people fresh out of college would be able to run the health ministry better that these bureaucrats,” he said.

He also told the news channel that had his senior minister Ghulam Nabi Azad not been pro-active during the H1N1 flu and left it to the bureaucracy, there would not have been any solution to the crisis.

In a report by Indian Express, health secretary K Sujatha Rao was quoted denying the charges and said that Indian bureaucracy “was among the most scrutinised in the world” and charges of red-tapism couldn’t stand.

The report further investigated to find that the conflict between the Trinamool Congress leader and health secretary Ms Rao arose over a concept note sent by Trivedi for a web portal that he, along with the Knowledge Commission, proposed to launch. The ministry did not release money for the portal.

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Bureaucracy bashing as a fashion statement

BoI survey on Indian bureaucracy: Fractured verdict

Western media on Indian bureaucracy

Action and Appointments

a) National Security Advisor, Shivshankar Menon will be visiting Beijing as Special Envoy of the Prime Minister of India, from 3rd to 6th July, 2010.

b) ACC has also approved the appointment of Jayant Prasad, a 1976 batch IFS as special secretary in the ministry of external affairs.

c) Arun Kumar Misra, a 1976 batch UP cadre IAS, presently Principal Adviser, Planning Commission, has been appointed as secretary department of drinking water and sanitation in the ministry of rural development

d) Bijoy Chatterjee, a 1973 batch West Bengal cadre IAS and secretary in the department of chemicals and petrochemicals in the ministry of chemicals and fertilizers will hold the additional charge of the post of secretary, department of fertilizers during the period of absence on leave of S Krishnan, a 1975 batch Uttarakhand cadre IAS from July 10 to July 14, 2010.

My Take: Don’t call Indian bureaucracy “suffocating”

QUOTING a survey done by Hong Kong-based firm, Political & Economic Risk Consultancy, Indian newspapers yesterday flashed a Reuters news item saying that Indian bureaucracy was least efficient among 12 Asian economies whereas those from Singapore topped the chart. The 12-page report based on a poll of 1,274 expatriates working in 12 Asian nations, went to an extent of terming India’s bureaucracy “suffocating”. It also said that working with the country's civil servants was a “slow and painful” process. I feel, we should not get carried away by a survey report and put the entire blame of system failure on Indian babudom. If you want to call Indian bureaucracy inefficient, don’t exonerate the political class, corporate leaders and intelligentsia too. In my 14 years of reporting in power corridors, I have encountered a large number of bureaucrats who transformed their departments into an institution despite serving under very inefficient and corrupt ministers. Can you call them below par vis-a-vis corporate CEOs? Absolutely not. I agree, some bureaucrats do fail to deliver like a corporate CEO though they are academically sound and have a passion to work in difficult circumstances. Yet, the number of such officers has come down in recent years in the backdrop of the government’s attempt to give them management trainings and allow them to work in private sector on deputation. The main handicap still is the lack of right synergy between bureaucrats and their political masters. The transfer, which is an age-old weapon of punishing babus by their political masters, still prevails leaving a massive demoralizing effect on officials. But yes, if Dr Manmohan Singh has succeeded to exclude non-performing ministers from his cabinet, he won’t hesitate to clamp down inefficient bureaucrats either. Maybe, the manner in which he will react would be quite different from Mayawati’s transfer saga in UP.