The NDA Government may have given greater freedom to Secretaries to function, but at the same time they have been made more accountable too.
In the latest among the slew of directives by the Cabinet Secretariat over the last few days, the Secretaries across all Ministries have been given a two-week deadline to complete inter-ministerial consultations for any Cabinet note. The Secretariat has made it clear the Ministry seeking comments from its counterparts would need to put it in writing the date on which the responses were sought.
Seen as an attempt to enforce accountability on babus tasked with taking crucial decisions, the directive further stated that the Secretaries who fail to provide inputs for Cabinet proposals within the stipulated time could be made to explain the delay in doing so before the Union Cabinet.
The circular, which was issued on June 20, said, “It has also been decided that if any consulted Ministry/Department has inputs that it considers necessary/critical for decision making in the case, and these could not be communicated to the sponsoring Ministry (the Ministry which has initiated the proposal), Secretary of such Ministry could be required to indicate such inputs during the meeting of the Cabinet along with reasons for not having been able to provide the comments in time.”
To avoid any ambiguity on the proposed deadline, the note clarified that the two-week period will begin from the day the Ministry concerned delivers the draft Cabinet note to other Ministries for consultations.
“In cases where the consulted Ministries fail to forward their comments to the sponsoring departments within two weeks, the sponsoring departments will clearly indicate in the body of the note the date on which comments were sought from the Ministries concerned and the fact that the comments of the Ministries have not been received till finalisation of the note for the Cabinet or the Cabinet Committee,” the instruction suggested.
The Cabinet Secretariat further compressed the timeline for providing requisite number of copies of the Cabinet Note from the recently-decided seven working days to three. The directive stated, “It has further been decided that after sending a single copy of the final (Cabinet) note to the Prime Minister’s Office and the Cabinet Secretariat, the time of seven working days for forwarding the requisite number of copies to the Cabinet Secretariat will stand revised to three days.”