Jogic powers

The Chhattisgarh chief minister has frittered away a golden opportunity to start on a clean slate when he decided to appoint over 5,000 da...

November 7, 2000 12:00 AM IST

4 min read

The Chhattisgarh chief minister has frittered away a golden opportunity to start on a clean slate when he decided to appoint over 5,000 daily-wage workers whom the Madhya Pradesh government had sacked. And, to compound his error, Ajit Jogi has also decided to pay the government staff dearness allowance retrospectively from January this year. Obviously, no thinking has gone into these decisions which will strike at the roots of his promise to keep the administrative cost within 40 per cent of the budget. While these decisions expose the lack of experience of this former bureaucrat, it is also a pointer to the wholly untenable status of the new government.

It is nearly a week since Jogi was sworn in as chief minister but he is yet to have a proper Cabinet to assist him. What8217;s worse, he has shown no urgency in constituting a ministry which, he says, will be done only after the Congress presidential election is over, although nobody knows how the two are related. The earliest he is planning a session of the Chhattisgarh Assembly is in February. All this is possible because Governor D.N. Sahay is also new to the job and has permitted Jogi to draw from the Consolidated Fund of India without having to prove his majority support in the legislature. Thus, for all practical purposes, there is nothing to restrain Jogi from foisting his whims on the fledgling state.

The chief minister8217;s plea that not many government employees in undivided Madhya Pradesh had agreed to be transferred to the new state does not hold water. At a time when most governments are trying to find ways to get rid of their surplus employees, he should have seen it as a godsend to keep the size of his government to the bare minimum so that more money can be spent on development. He could have thought of ways to reduce dependence on government staff by going in for computerisation and privatisation. Instead, he preferred the option to be populist and gain the cheap sympathy of the staff. And what kind of employees are these 5,000 he is going to appoint? It required immense courage for Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Digvijay Singh to sack nearly 45,000 daily-wage employees who had been a drain on the state exchequer for decades. It should be said to Singh8217;s credit that he stuck to his decision despite his political rivals, both within and outside the Congress, trying to exploit the issue for their ownbenefit.

Most of these employees had been recruited on an ad hoc basis, not so much to fulfil an administrative need but to oblige officials and politicians.

That they did not come through the regular recruitment process and do not have the requisite qualifications goes without saying. For many of them, work consisted mainly of marking their attendance and drawing their monthly salary. If at all their sacking had affected the working of the MP government, it was only for the better. It is with this lot that Jogi is now planning to fill his state secretariat. Since they will retire only after many years, the state will have to bear the consequences of the wrong decision for a long time. This is hardly the way for Jogi to begin in his new job, particularly when he wants to end the poverty of the people amidst the plenty of minerals in the newest state of the country.

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