The Hindu Business Line : Wasted exhortation

THE homily of the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, to the 137 Secretaries in the various Ministries on how to pep up their performance has received high praise from all quarters. It is certainly without precedent. Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri almost entirely depended on the Cabinet Secretary and their own departmental Secretaries.

Indira Gandhi sometimes used to meet Secretaries on an individual basis as she saw no point in wasting time on large gatherings which, she felt, were not conducive to decision-making based on a focussed attention to the issue at hand. Rajiv Gandhi met Secretaries in twos and threes, and his preferred method to energise the top brass of bureaucracy was to make them go through refresher courses, sometimes jointly with MPs and Ministers, arranged by professional institutions.

It is Dr Manmohan Singh who, for the first time, has hit upon the idea of summoning the whole lot of stuffed shirts to his presence. With due respect, for all the hype it produced, his exhortation to them was old hat, and not earth-shaking. He wanted them to perform their duties diligently and conscientiously, so as to help the Government fulfil the expectations of the people in respect of eradication of poverty and generation of jobs, as per the Common Minimum Programme. So far so good.

It is when he comes to the truism that they should discharge their functions "without fear or favour" that the Secretaries would have exchanged sceptical glances. They must be asking themselves whether and to what extent they can count on the Prime Minister to stake his office to support them if they took him seriously.

In the prevalent political culture, which is ready to impute motives to any advice or action by civil servants, especially if they are appointees of another dispensation, will Dr Manmohan Singh be able to protect a Secretary who sticks to principles?

He has also asked them to directly meet him on any matter where they feel his intervention would help. This offer too will remain a dead letter. First, Secretaries know better than to seem disloyal to their Ministers by going over their heads to the PM; and, second, the few who do try will find the promise of ready access to PM belied in actual practice. The "dreary desert sands of dead habits" cannot so easily be swept away.

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