:: Dilip Cherian

Babus return to school

Dilip Cherian

Nov.15 : After repeatedly trying to tell babus in the rank of joint secretaries to improve the quality of notes received by the Union Cabinet and its various committees, Cabinet Secretary K.M. Chandrasekhar has finally decided to give them lessons in preparing error-free and unambiguous notes.

According to sources, the Cabinet Secretary is peeved that even after providing joint secretaries and other senior babus with a handbook of instructions, which contains gyan on how to prepare the perfect Cabinet note among other things, his secretariat still receives a lot of extraneous information and background in the notes. According to sources, many Cabinet notes are sloppily prepared, with their authors getting even basics like the name of the ministry, page and file numbers, ordering of paragraphs, double space typing etc wrong. So long as the notes were for babus’ eyes only, no one seemed to mind. But now with the citizenry, armed with Right to Information, is at the gates demanding access to sarkari files and documents, the senior babus understandably will need to exercise more caution.

So now, after the censure from the Cabinet Secretary, babus will have to seek approval of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) before finalising the Cabinet note, and also avoid reference to the views of the PMO or the Cabinet Secretariat. Will Mr Chandrasekhar’s tutorials make an impact? Only time will tell!

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Lucky games

The controversies surrounding the preparations for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, interestingly, have been a boon for many babus. Now that the government has made it clear that the Games take precedence over everything else in the capital, some babus associated with the preparations have used this opportunity to stick to their posts. Apparently, Aruna Sharma, Director-General of Doordarshan, according to sources, has managed a one-year extension on the plea that she heads the official state broadcaster of the Games.

Meanwhile, more babus are being inducted into the Games organising committee. After the rather public spat between Suresh Kalmadi, chairman of the committee, and Mike Fennel, president of the Commonwealth Games Federation, the government has appointed Jarnail Singh, a Manipur-Tripura cadre officer of the 1974 batch, as CEO of the organising committee. Moreover, sports minister M.S. Gill has signed off on the organising committee’s request to induct three more senior Indian Administrative Service babus to strengthen the preparation efforts. While such actions may not assuage the worries of Fennel and Co, at least the babus are not complaining!