Kerala endorses Modi mantra on e-governance

Kerala has become the first state in India to adopt Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s minimum government maximum governance mantra.

Updated on: Aug 16, 2015, 22:46:33 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Kerala has become the first state in India to adopt Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s minimum government maximum governance mantra and has sought the help of newly constituted National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog to ‘rationalise’ departments.

The Congress-ruled state has about 47 departments apart from over 57 directorates. The state government runs over 150 schemes for benefit of different section of the society and provides e-governance services for a large number of them.

“When Kerala CM Oommen Chandy came for last NITI Aayog meeting, he’d expressed the wish to rationalise his government to improve efficiency.

And then the PM asked him that he can take help of the NITI Aayog,” a senior government official said.

Officials from the Kerala government had held initial consultation with NITI Aayog member Bibek Debroy and other officials on reducing the departments and the schemes.

“Different scenarios on merging the departments and the schemes were being worked out,” an official said, adding that the Aayog, which replaced the erstwhile Planning Commission, would present its report to the Kerala government soon.

PM Modi had given a call for ‘minimum government, maximum governance’ in his first Independence Day speech last year and asked state governments to implement it at NITI Aayog meetings with chief ministers.

The last NDA government in 2000 had set up an Expenditure Finance Commission under KP Geetha Krishnan which had recommended scrapping of many of the government departments and wings and abolition of 42,000 posts.

While the 21,000 posts were reduced, its recommendations on scrapping departments could not be implemented as the NDA government was replaced by UPA in 2014.

The officials said NITI Aayog, in its restructured format, will examine how the concept of ‘minimum government, maximum governance’ can be implemented in the central government.

NITI Aayog itself will be a mean organisation with the number of staff being one-third of the erstwhile Planning Commission.

The NITI Aayog has also started working on creation of project monitoring groups in each state, like the Project Monitoring Group of the central government and identification of redundant law for repealing in Rajasthan.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
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.Read More

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