Hard Taskmaster: PM Modi jacks up ministries performance target by 10%
Even before the new think tank to replace the Planning Commission is officially announced, some of its functions are being defined. This includes giving it powers to monitor different Central ministries.
Even before the new think tank to replace the Planning Commission is officially announced, some of its functions are being defined. That includes giving the new think tank the powers to monitor the performance of different Central ministries and implementation of innovative ideas of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
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The Prime Minister’s Office has told the secretary Planning Commission Sindhushree Khullar to regularly interact with the secretaries to ensure that they are able to do better than the targets set by them.
In addition, PM Modi brainchild ideas of Digital India, Skill India and Swacch Bharat will also be monitored by the panel. “We would be submitting regular reports to the PMO on the progress being made on these fronts,” an official said.
A minimum improvement of 10% of the target given by the ministries has been set as the performance level by the PMO for the ministries, a senior panel functionary said, and added that the officials would come out with revised targets for all ministries in consultation with the PMO. Modi at a recent function had said that he was not a headmaster but a hard-task master and the latest directive is an indication of he pushing the officials to do better.
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The PMO has also said that the officials in the divisions entrusted with monitoring job would continue with their job till the new think tank is put in place. Officials in the infrastructure division will monitor work of railways, road transport and civil aviation ministries whereas some other advisors would deal with social sector ministries.
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The PMO has also said that the officials in the divisions entrusted with monitoring job would continue with their job till the new think tank is put in place. Officials in the infrastructure division will monitor work of railways, road transport and civil aviation ministries whereas some other advisors would deal with social sector ministries.
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This is the first definite indication of what would be the job division of the officials in the new think tank whose nitty gritty is being worked out. The panel sources said that a list of officials to be transferred to other ministries have already been sent to the PMO.
Khullar has also made a 15-page presentation on the performance of core infrastructure ministries for 2014-15 and deliberated on the targets suggested by the ministries for the current fiscal.
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The has proposed laying of 300 km new railway track during the current fiscal but the PM wants it to be minimum 500 kms. Indian railways laid 450 kms of new track in 2013-14, which was short of the targeted 500 km. Similarly, the PMO has upwardly revised the target of 700 km for doubling of rail tracks in the current fiscal against 900 km targeted in 2013-14.
The road transport ministry has been asked to ensure minimum development of 7,000 kms of new highways till end of the current financial year. This comes after the environment ministry informed the PMO that all impediments in the ministry’s clearance process for infrastructure projects have been removed.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
