Joshi gone, HRD carries on

The gun-toting security personnel stroll outside the third floor office of Murli Manohar Joshi with a rare commitment. The way they check th...

The gun-toting security personnel stroll outside the third floor office of Murli Manohar Joshi with a rare commitment. The way they check the credentials of anybody passing by makes you feel they are convinced Joshi would be back tomorrow. Meanwhile, the real action in the very busy Human Resource Development Ministry has shifted two floors above.

Visitors stream into the spacious Room no 505 where an apparently modest Dr Vallabhbhai Kathiria, famous in Rajkot as a regular blood donor and a cancer specialist, holds court. He is the Minister of State for HRD and looks after higher and secondary education. In Saurashtra, the locals also call him the check-dam man.

This evening, there were impatient, fidgety men awaiting their turn to meet him in the rooms adjoining his office. Kathiria is a first-time Parliamentarian and is still not practised in the art of dismissing visitors in the shortest possible time. His assistants and aides would rather let him know that there are others in queue but Kathiria’s brand of politics is about listening, not preaching.

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Bureaucrats whisper that unlike Sanjay Paswan, the other MoS in charge of elementary education and literacy, Kathiria has been given a long rope by an otherwise possessive Joshi. The HRD Minister is giving elementary education a big push and Paswan has been not been allowed to meddle at all. On the other hand, Kathiria has enjoyed a relatively free run on policy matters concerning higher education.

This evening, there is an elderly Mr Singhania, who has dropped in with a scrapbook on defence-related articles. He wants to hold an exhibition and is looking for a venue. Kathiria agrees his home town, Rajkot, would be the ideal choice. He also nods when a group of Bengalis wanted him to inaugurate their Durga Puja in Paschim Vihar on October 1.

After his recent admission at the Teachers’ Day function that he was overwhelmed by Joshi’s towering personality he doesn’t seem to have a choice but to look embarrassed about all this attention. Not that media glare implies real power. The doctor will get to meet more people, may be, but the purse-strings are not really in his hand. And even without Joshi, the HRD ministry has been carrying on its deliberations with foreign donors like World Bank, European Commission and the DFID of Britain.

Yes, there are policy issues on which final decisions are not being taken at the moment. When he left, Joshi was giving shape to ideas on how engineering courses might be revised. He wanted technical education revamped.

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The C-wing of Shastri Bhavan has been recording usual attendance. The bureaucrats have meetings lined up, their schedules permitting hardly a free moment. The festive season is round the corner and the holiday applications are piling up on the senior-most bureaucrats’ tables. Only discussions lingers. ‘‘Is Joshiji coming back? What will the Prime Minister do?’’