New Delhi : To improve the efficiency of the ruling government, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has divided 77 members from the entire Council of Ministers into eight different groups. This initiative has been taken to develop technology-based resources and form a pool of professionals for their recruitment into their teams, government sources said.
Modi government is planning to keep in the young professionals, wanting to make best use of technology for project monitoring and seek suggestions from retiring officials, sources said.
The initiative of dividing ministers into eight groups ‘Chintan Shivirs’ (brainstorming sessions) of the entire council that was chaired by PM Modi. Each meeting went on for nearly five hours. In all five such meetings were held – one each on Personal Efficiency, Focused Implementation, Ministry Functioning and Stakeholder Engagement, Party Coordination and Effective Communication and the last one was on Parliamentary practices.
The last session was attended by the Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla and Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu.
As per the sources these meetings focused on improving the efficiency and the delivery system of the Modi government. By making the ministers more hands-on approach, the formation of groups have been done with a focus on overall improvement in the governance, they added.
The 77 ministers are part of one of these eight groups, each comprising nine to ten ministers with one union minister designated as a group coordinator, sources further said.
The tasks being assigned to these groups include are – developing a portal in each minister’s office that gives updates on the performance of the government’s flagship schemes and policies, a dashboard for monitoring decisions made by the respective ministers and a system to schedule meetings and managing correspondence. They have also been directed to develop stakeholder engagement programmes and create profiles of all states, districts and ministries.
One of the groups has been tasked to develop a mechanism for creating a team of three young professionals having good command over communication, research and other key areas, sources said. Another group has been assigned to develop a portal on the experiences and feedback of the retiring employees, they added.
Among the union ministers who are coordinators for their respective groups are – Hardeep Singh Puri, Narendra Singh Tomar, Piyush Goyal, Dharmendra Pradhan, Smriti Irani and Anurag Thakur, sources further said.
These ministers have been given this responsibility so that they could share good practices of their respective offices with other cabinet colleagues. Most of the ministers, who gave presentations during the brainstorming meetings, have been tasked with coordinating their respective groups.
On Modi’s instruction, the union ministers carpooled with their cabinet colleagues from different ministries and hailing from different states to attend the ‘Chintan Shivirs’.
This process will also benefit those new ministers who have got the opportunity to work with the Centre for the first time.
PM Modi also spoke about ‘tiffin meetings’ during his Gujarat days, where everyone used to bring their own tiffins to meetings and share the food as well as ideas.
These meetings are considered important in view of the 2024 general elections.
Their aim is to streamline the government and speed up and sharpen the work so that people do not get a chance to complain.
There have been continuous meetings of the Union Council of Ministers since its expansion in July this year.
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