Sunday, 24 April 2022 | PNS | Dehradun
Amid the ongoing talk on the demand of some ministers of Pushkar Singh Dhami cabinet about giving them the authority to write the Confidential Roll (CR) of their secretaries, the former chief secretary of Uttarakhand Indu Kumar Pandey has said that there is no need for any such provision. Pandey told The Pioneer that the ministers and the bureaucracy should work together for the betterment of the people and development of the state. He said that there is already a system set in place for making entries in the CR of the officers and there is no need to change it. Pandey added that even in the states where the ministers have the authority to write the CR of secretaries the reviewing and the accepting authority can make alterations.
The CR is an assessment of the character, conduct, capabilities and performance of an official in a year and is done by his immediate senior who is the reporting authority. This is then brought before the reviewing authority and then accepting authority.
Immediately after the swearing in of the BJP government for the second consecutive time in March this year a debate on whether or not the ministers should be given the authority to write the CR of their secretaries started. Senior cabinet minister Satpal Maharaj is the most vocal voice in favour of the new arrangement. He pointed out that this arrangement was followed in Uttarakhand earlier but was discontinued. He said that in many states the ministers have the authority for making entries into the CR of the secretaries and it should be restarted in Uttarakhand. His cabinet colleagues Saurabh Bahuguna and Prem Chand Agarwal also supported the idea. There is a consensus among the ministers that the practice should restart in Uttarakhand so that the unbridled bureaucracy is reined in. Most of them admit in private that the secretaries do not take them seriously as they cannot do anything to discipline them.
