Rajan Ghate went on a hunger strike seeking the restoration of governance. He broke his fast on medical advice, with no response from the government. The opposition Congress has been repeatedly drumming up on the continued theme of absence of governance, demanding even a one-day Assembly session to make the government prove it majority. Again it has got no response. Activists have been also seeking that a full-time chief minister be appointed, and while there was again no response to any of this, Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar over the weekend held a meeting with BJP MLAs and bureaucrats at his private residence and discussed certain issues with them.
With the government officers, Parrikar reviewed the work on various ongoing projects, including that of the third bridge on River Mandovi, and asked that the process to fill up vacancies in various government departments be expedited. Government vacancies have not been filled for the last two years and the process for employment has been kept on hold for the last nine months since the time Parrikar took ill. Government jobs, was an item on the agenda, when Parrikar met the BJP MLAs the same day, where mining was also discussed. These therefore – Mandovi bridge and government recruitment apart from mining resumption – appear to be the priorities of the government.
A month after the cabinet meeting of October, in his first meeting with bureaucrats and party MLAs, and following a number of ministers admitting that there is an administrative slowdown, these were the most pressing issues that the Chief Minister discussed in his interaction with MLAs and bureaucrats. What happened to finance and the fall in revenue that has led to the sale of government bonds? What happened to the three instances of police brutality in the month of November that indicates a failure of the policing department? Was governance brought up?
Interestingly governance did figure, the MLAs admitted that smooth functioning of the administration was a point of discussion. But, even more remarkable was the fact that after the meeting, an official from the Chief Minister’s Office said that the Chief Minister did discuss certain bottlenecks in governance due to his physical absence from the office. There was no elucidation on the nature of the bottlenecks and the solutions to ease them, but this is the first time that the Chief Minister’s Office has even broached the subject. Is this finally an admission from the CMO that the absence of the Chief Minister is affecting governance and administration? Ministers have already said it quite often, but nobody from the Chief Minister’s close circle had mentioned it till this day.
The absence of governance is not the figment of imagination of the opposition. Ministers in the government have aired their views on it. During the week that has gone by, the Revenue and IT Minister said that files from his department were finally moving. This he had said, after he had gone public a few days earlier, with the admission that bureaucrats had been delaying files concerning his departments, even wondering aloud why they were delaying them. It took a minister to go public with the delays in his departments for the bureaucrats to act, which indicates that there indeed has been an administrative slowdown.
What are the priorities of the government? It’s politically expedient to get the bridge over the River Mandovi ready before the Lok Sabha elections. It is also a race against time to recruit staffers in government departments before the 2019 elections. It is also important to show the mining dependents that the government is taking up their cause, so the announcement that the CM will speak to the PM on this. Sadly, these are all political issues far outweighing governance and administrative matters.
