Pahalwan’s envious feat
Mota Pahalwan, who had kept the erstwhile Vijay Bahuguna regime on the tenterhooks for long, has managed to do the same on the present Harish Rawat regime. Recently, the Chief Minister Rawat was heard briefing the bureaucrats to implement commitments he had dished out to the people of the constituency of the maverick legislator, Mota Pahalwan. Thereafter, the officials plunged headlong into acting on the order with alacrity with the threat dangling over them that any laxness on the matter would incur the CM’s wrath. Pahalwan’s clout thus soaring high is making other legislators green with envy. Should they now wrestle with Pahalwan to out-maneuver him in the art of browbeating the CM and others calling the shots in the State in supine acquiescenceIJ
Tell-tale Message
Chief Minister Harish Rawat has sent forth a message that he is intent on giving the bureaucrats their just deserts by going for a minor administrative re-jig. He appointed two IAS officers in key posts. While one Principal Secretary Omprakash has been appointed Principal Secretary to the CM another Secretary Mohammad Shahid had been given additional charge of Information. According to the observers, there is another message conspicuously lurking in the otherwise routine re-arrangement of the bureaucratic make-up. He wants to bring home the point that the Babus need not dawdle their ways to Bijapur Guest House to get postings after their hearts.
Persona non-grata
Chief Secretary Subhash Kumar extended term ending by October 31, the race for the most coveted post in the State’s Babudom is intensifying. The name of the senior-most IAS officer in the secretariat Rakesh Sharma, who is currently serving as Additional Chief Secretary, is doing the rounds in the corridors of power. However, things might not go his way, given the CM himself being ill-disposed to make him the number one in the State’s bureaucracy. Widely known for his penchant to go out of his ways to humour the Babus, he is unlikely to make seniority the only criterion while zeroing in on the post. This is because around a dozen bureaucrats, all green-horns, known as inimical to Sharma, are doing everything to stonewall things for him. They have even met the CM, beseeching him to desist from hoisting Sharma at the helm of the State’s Babudom. Things are still murky. The answer, of course, rests with the CM who has been keeping a studied silence for understandable reasons.
Babus’ magic dirt
Conjuring up bits of papers from nowhere and sweeping clean the corridors of the Chief Minister’s residence off them is what marked the gaudy observance of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s much-vaunted Swachh Bharat Abhiyan by the members of the State’s bureaucracy. Those with inside knowledge of things are convinced the CM’s official complex being always clean since its inception way back in 2008 needed no broom being wielded by the Babus that day to be swept clean. So whence the dirt came from is an unresolved enigma.The sanitation employees whose exemplary commitment to their assigned work is what is deemed to have kept the CM office bereft of dirt are at the receiving end of the Babus inventing dirt to enhance their reputation vis-à-vis the PM’s dream initiative.