Even as Bihar Assembly Speaker Vijay Kumar Choudhary is trying to bring reforms in the functioning of the House and come up to the expectations of the peoples’ representatives and the public at large he is not getting required cooperation from the bureaucrats.

Choudhary who has introduced many reforms in bid to streamline the functioning of the parliamentary practices has introduced the system of receiving questions from the members online and replying them through same channel. The questions received are forwarded to the departments concerned online and the officials are supposed to provide replies online. It has been named as Question Reply Management System

But what shocked Choudhary was that several departments who had been forwarded questions did not take them seriously and almost avoided them. This angered the Speaker who pulled up the bureaucrats.

Choudhary said for the five days session beginning on Monday, 471 questions had been filed online by the members but reply to 310 questions were yet to be received from ten major departments including education, water resources and energy. He directed the Development Commissioner to take the issue with the officials concerned and himself monitor the compliance.

The Speaker said that in order to bring transparency in the recruitment policy, some changes have been affected and that now the Speaker and the Assembly Secretariat will no longer have any role in the appointments. Earlier there had been practice of appointment in the Assembly by the Speaker and hundreds of cases are lying in the courts against the decisions.

Now the recruitment job has been awarded to a Central agency, which is also responsible for recruitments in the Parliament, which has advertised posts and sought applications. For 70 vacant posts of assistants more than 1.68 lakh and for 70 vacancies of Group C grade over 5.07 lakh applications have been received online. For 60 posts of junior clerks 70,120 and for 55 posts of reporters 6379 applications have come.