Monitoring babus

Following the lead of several other states, Maharashtra too has devised a new performance monitoring system. Chief minister Ashok Chavan has been already boasting about the fact that his will be the first state where babus will analyse their performance themselves.

Towards this initiative, two babus from the Centre, Dr Prajapati Trivedi, secretary, performance management, and Arun Maira, member of the Planning Commission, conducted a workshop in Mumbai. Babus were taught how to design framework documents and rate themselves on a scale ranging from excellent to poor, or from one to 10, to make evaluation quantifiable.
However, the final evaluation input will be in the hands of state chief secretary J.P. Dange. With this, the state government hopes to achieve two goals — to perform better and enable the delivery monitoring unit to continuously evaluate projects. This at least is the intention. How far the government goes in achieving it, remains to be seen.

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CCI steps it up
More than a year after it came into being, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) has yet to pronounce a verdict on pending cases. Amid mounting criticism, the commission is now planning to step on the gas. Members of the panel have already decided to dispose off pending cases at the rate of four a month. CCI chairman Dhanendra Kumar is proposing to hire more personnel to cope with the workload.
Curiously, not everyone is pleased with the idea. Former CCI chairman Vinod Dhall feels that it’s not unusual for a new regulator to take time to dispose off his first case. He says that the slow pace of work can be attributed to the government’s delay in recruiting staff, the controversies the panel has been facing, and the lack of clarity on its jurisdiction. The CCI is currently engaged in a spat with its own appellate body, the Competition Appellate Tribunal. But for Mr Kumar and his colleagues, faster decisions are the best way to leave controversy behind.

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A green mission
Jairam Ramesh, minister of state for environment and forests, may be under pressure, but he sure is ensuring that his babus’ skills are improved. Though babus being sent abroad may sound like a junket, not all sarkari foreign trips are odes to indulgence. The ministry of environment and forests, for one, is packing off 60 Indian Forest Service (IFS) officers. These babus will be participating in a training programme, designed by the ministry in collaboration with Maxwell School of Syracuse University. According to sources, the aim is to help these IFS officers grow from being just technocrats to green visionaries. We may thus see a new breed of forest officers soon.