Ministers unwilling to curtail discretionary powers

Over two years have passed since a Group of Ministers (GoM) decided to curb Union ministers’ discretionary powers, but the ministries are yet to budge.

Updated on: Jan 6, 2014, 20:39:54 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Over two years have passed since a Group of Ministers (GoM) decided to curb Union ministers’ discretionary powers, but the ministries are yet to budge.

None of the 38 central ministries, whose in-charges enjoy discretionary powers, has framed regulatory guidelines on the exercise of these powers as recommended in 2011 by a ministerial group headed by President Pranab Mukherjee, who was then finance minister.

However, with corruption emerging as a core election issue and the success of the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi on an anti-corruption plank, the government has renewed its effort to check the discretionary powers of ministers.

"In this regard several reminders have already been issued… you are requested to expedite requisite information to this department urgently," read an instruction issued recently by the DoPT to the 38 ministries.

Even Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi at a recent function in Delhi had called arbitrary discretionary powers a reason for corruption. The Union ministers enjoy discretionary powers in senior-level appointments in the government and its undertakings, admissions in schools and colleges, allocation of gas stations and grant of environmental approval to projects.

Ministers of social sector ministries, which gets about Rs 2 lakh crore as central allocation every year, also enjoy discretion in allocation of funds to non-governmental organisations and to state governments. The ministers also have powers to relax norms or tweak regulations that can help certain private players.

The ministerial group’s key recommendation aimed at checking corruption at the highest level and making the decision-making process more transparent was accepted by the government.

The department of personnel and training (DoPT) headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was mandated to ensure that each ministry had a framework to regulate and ensure transparency in the use of these discretionary powers.

But the DoPT is finding it difficult to push the ministries to accept the government decision and curb ministers’ powers.

"It is like to asking ministers to chop their own fingers," said a government official on condition of anonymity.

"Unless a clear-cut framework is decided upon and the ministers are forced to accept it, I think the government decision will remain on paper."

This is not the only transparency framework being pushed by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), which is facing resistance from ministers.

No ministry has put details of its official travels on the ministry websites as asked by the PMO nearly six months ago.

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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