Tenure cap for ministers personal staff soon

After six years of unbroken tenure at the Centre,the UPA government has realised that allowing personal staff to continue with ministers for long is against corporate governance best practices. An office order issued by the department of personnel and training has put an upper limit to the service tenure of ministerial personal staff. The order dated May 13 which has created consternation in government circles says no one can continue among the personal staff of ministers for more than 10 years.

After six years of unbroken tenure at the Centre,the UPA government has realised that allowing personal staff to continue with ministers for long is against corporate governance best practices. An office order issued by the department of personnel and training (DoPT) has put an upper limit to the service tenure of ministerial personal staff.

The order dated May 13 which has created consternation in government circles says no one can continue among the personal staff of ministers for more than 10 years.

This will apply to ministerial staff sourced from the open market or from within the government. A Cabinet minister can have 13 members in his personal staff,including private secretaries,personal assistants,officers on special duty and so on. Ministers of state can appoint six. The order will cover all appointments,including retired officers selected from PSUs or autonomous bodies.

To ensure that ministers are not suddenly left without personal staff,the order clarifies: It would not be practical to open cases of all appointments with ministers at all levels and recalculate their tenure or cancel their appointments as the case may be. No appointment will be made which is not in accordance with these instructions.

Some ministers had apparently reasoned with the department to get the order effective prospectively.

The order says: Ministries have raised certain queries regarding the applicability of these instructions.

An officer connected with the exercise explained that if a minister has a PS who has been with him for six years and if that PS has served five years with another minister,it would be considered as a breach.

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Sources in DoPT said that this process was mooted in 2004 when BK Chaturvedi was cabinet secretary and Suresh Pachauri was minister for personnel and training. But that proposal was supposed to cover only government officers. The argument advanced at that time was that officers serving on the personal staff of ministers get better Annual Confidential Reports (ACR) than those serving under other bureaucrats,creating a hierarchy of sorts in the matter. Officers would markedly prefer to have direct access to a minister than serve in the parent cadre, said a senior bureaucrat privy to that debate. The reason why the order was extended to those recruited from the open market was because of the nature of the job. If,for years,a person has direct access to highest echelons of power,interests become entrenched and it is difficult to remove them, said a source. We know of people who have served in the United Front government,the NDA government and are now with Congress ministers, said a source.

Personal staff of a minister is a crucial ingredient in controlling access to him or her and sometimes even in shaping policy matters. While new ministers would need an experienced hand to guide their first steps in government,the DoPT is not amused by the recycling of staff. The first order was issued on March 4,this year,after which several ministers wanted clarifications, said a source.