At PMO, a new system in place to keep files moving

When Manmohan Singh was in Bangkok on his first foreign trip as Prime Minister, his office had to fax him an entire file which needed his im...

When Manmohan Singh was in Bangkok on his first foreign trip as Prime Minister, his office had to fax him an entire file which needed his immediate attention. To do away with situations such as this, the PMO will now have a file tracking system in place.

This mechanism has been introduced by a committee set up at the suggestion of the Prime Minister to initiate a series of administrative reforms within the Government.

For a start, every file received by the PMO will have the date of receipt, along with the dates of its handling by various sections of the PMO, pasted on it before it reaches the Prime Minister.

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The committee has Cabinet Secretary B K Chaturvedi, Central Vigilance Commissioner P Shankar and Prime Minister’s Principal Secretary T K A Nair as members. The inclusion of the CVC allows the committee to examine files from the vigilance standpoint. The panel is also expected to look at the issue of reforms in Public Sector Undertakings.

	PM to review CMP work

			• NEW DELHI: The PM will hold a review meeting in the PMO this week on the Common Minimum Programme (CMP) work. For the review, PMO officials have prepared an 18-point list which details programmes, promises made in the CMP, departments or ministries handling the programmes, and the follow-up action. The PMO has categorised the 18 items under different heads: need for legislative review, administrative action, examination by a panel, etc.

This apart, a second committee has been quietly constituted with an even more interesting brief. Meeting every month, it will examine complaints filed by bureaucrats of the level of Joint Secretary or above. The committee has Cabinet Secretary, Principal Secretary and Personnel Secretary A N Tewari as members.

It has already met once to decide procedures for its functioning. The logic behind creating a complaint redressal committee, PMO officials pointed out, is to have collective brainstorming in the PMO, different from a situation where senior bureaucrats take up their complaints separately with the Cabinet Secretariat, Department of Personnel and PMO.

Ritu Sarin

Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption. Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More

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