4-6-2 puzzle
Emboldened by his senior’s leniency, an engineer who was caught on the wrong side of a tendering process approached the administration. But what happened there left him scared. He promptly decided to come off the high horse he was riding. What happened is that the senior let him off the hook with just entering an adverse entry into his annual character report (ACR) for his alleged delay in clearing a tender of a project and then awarding it to a company which quoted a higher price than the other. However, convinced that his senior was acting leniently with the matter, he started grumbling over the adverse entry. To have it erased, he started building pressure. With the matter reaching the administration, the engineer approached a babu. The crafty secretary of the department told him point blank that aside from the adverse entry, he was liable to be forced to cough up the sum the government has lost due to his wrongdoing of awarding the contract to the wrong company. Scared of the administration punching holes in his wallet, he started stammering while explaining his conduct. This reminds one of the oft-quoted proverb of a Choubey who goes to become a Chabbe returning as a Dubey, meaning a person who goes make a four a six returns with two.:
Worthy OSDs
Chief minister’s office (CMO) has several OSDs who are tasked to help the state government in day- to- day functioning. They are supposed to generate new ideas about how things can be better. The move as usual courted criticism with the OSDs being political appointees. However, some of them have proved their worth by stopping a large sum of the exchequer from frittering away for nothing. What happened is that in their bid to save the government funds through exercising austerity, they approached several private telecom companies to bargain with them. They told the telecom officials that they must make their offers more lucrative to enable them to go for mass mobile number portability, meaning a switch to them from the government-run companies. This trick served its purpose as the mobile companies, now engaged in a struggle for survival, readily agreed to fall in line. It is a good move for the state, say many. The government-run companies are charging the government employees more than Rs 500 per month plus 18 percent GST, swelling the bill amount of the post-paid subscribers and resulting in a large amount from the exchequer going on waste. With the private companies providing similar service at half the rate, it would help the CMO to save Rs 7.5 lakh per month or Rs nine crore per annum. Significantly, the government is having over 2500 subscribers in its payroll.