After the meetings, the prime minister has announced some major restructuring moves. Here are some key points.
File image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi ANI
In a major push for a hands-on approach to governance, the Modi government is planning to rope in young professionals, seek suggestions from retiring officials and make the best use of technology for project monitoring, besides various other steps to be overseen by eight different groups comprising of members from the entire Council of Ministers, sources said.
The decision comes after five rounds of introspection and discussions between the Prime Minister and his Council of Ministers, News18 said. Packaged as ‘Chintan Shivirs’ (introspection camps), each session reportedly lasted for more than five hours during which the ministers gave presentations and the PM deliberated on several issues.
A total of five such sessions were held – one each on Personal Efficiency, Focused Implementation, Ministry Functioning and Stakeholder Engagement, Party Coordination and Effective Communication and the last one was on Parliamentary practices.
The last brainstorming meeting was also attended by the Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla and Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu.
After the meetings, the prime minister has announced some major restructuring moves. Here are some key points.
All of 77 ministers have been divided into eight groups, each comprising nine to ten ministers with one Union minister designated as a group coordinator, sources said.
The aim of this group is to develop technology-based resources, create a pool of professionals for recruiting in their teams. This will bring more transparency and further improve the efficiency of the Modi government, the sources said.
These groups are tasked with developing a portal in each minister’s office that gives updates on the performance of the Centre’s flagship schemes and policies, a dashboard for monitoring decisions made by the respective ministers and a system to schedule meetings and managing correspondence are among the tasks assigned to these groups.
They have also been asked to create profiles of all districts, states and ministries and develop stakeholder engagement programmes.
One of the groups has been assigned to set up a mechanism for creating a team of at least three young professionals with command over research, communication and other key areas, the sources said.
Similarly, a group has been assigned to create a portal that maintains feedback and experiences of the retiring employees, sources said.
Union Ministers Hardeep Singh Puri, Narendra Singh Tomar, Piyush Goyal, Dharmendra Pradhan, Smriti Irani, Anurag Thakur are among the ministers who are the coordinators of their respective groups, the sources said.
They have been given this responsibility so that they can share the good practices of their respective offices with other cabinet colleagues.
With inputs from PTI