In a signal that he is here to stay and he is in charge, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has begun a series of separate breakfast meetings with his senior ministers to address issues of governance.Over the last four days, the Prime Minister has already had one-on-one morning meetings with Railway Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav and External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh at his Race Course Road residence.He is expected to meet Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee and Chemicals and Fertilisers Minister Ram Vilas Paswan soon and Sharad Pawar after the Maharashtra elections.Now that political equations are in place, his senior colleagues are slowly coming to accept him as PM after their initial reservations. The PM’s breakfast show is meant to demonstrate that the dispensation led by him is firmly in the saddle.He started off with the most colourful of all his ministers, Laloo Yadav, whose "tainted" colleagues have given him bad moments in the last three months. In his one-hour meeting, the Prime Minister reportedly went over his plans for the Ministry and the priority areas.The PM’s message to his colleague from Bihar, sources said, was not to spread things out too thinly but to concentrate on one or two things that would make an impact, infrastructure being one of them. Singh is believed to have urged Laloo to pursue with vigour the Railways project to lay an optical fibre broadband to network the country.The second Minister he met was Natwar Singh. Manmohan Singh reviewed his recent visit to the US with his Foreign Minister. Soon after he took over as PM, there was tension between the two as Natwar Singh made several statements which had kicked off a storm. During his US visit, he made sure that Natwar Singh was beside him at all important functions. Of course, he accompanied him to the breakfast meeting with US President George Bush, he sat with the PM at the press conference in New York, he stayed on longer in the US to follow up after the PM came back.
