Thambidurai ruffles bureaucracy with order

Approval of projects over Rs five crore by the Minister will effectively include most of the projects since there is hardly any project in the MoST which costs less than that, sources said. “Even a pothole repairing machine will cost more than that. Every little thing will now have to be cleared by the Minister, causing delays,” an officer said.

The orders were issued by the Minister amidprotests and resentment of the officials. “The officials of the Ministry had been resisting the proposal for over the past two months. But the Minister, disregarding the general opinion, has gone ahead and finalised it,” an official disclosed. The Minister was undermining the role of the officials, he said.

With increasing liberalisation and need for more transparency, the field officers should have been given more authority instead of centralising all power with the Minister, an officer said.

“The role of the Ministry is to set guidelines, frame policies and ensure that financial rules are being followed. It is not to take on all the responsibility, rendering field officers useless. There are competent officers and competent authorities like the NHAI to do the work,” the official said resentfully.

Other officials also said that they failed to understand that when all other government sectors and Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) like the ONGC and SAIL were decentralising authority, what hadprompted Thambidurai to take this decision?