August 10, 1998

The realisation finally dawns on Vajpayee

Prabhu Chawla

On paper, all the Prime Minister's men are wired. The high-roofed, teak-panelled rooms in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) in South Block are provided with state-of-the-art computers for retrieving any information that the prime minister may need. In reality, these expensive machines have merely become toys. This fact dawned on the mandarins last week when they discovered that while there were over 200 different types of screen savers, none of the computers had any worthwhile information relating to governance: data on senior-level vacancies in the Government, important decisions pending in the PMO and other ministries or economic indicators. The hi-tech machines had merely replaced the old typewriters. Happiest, of course, were the computer-friendly civil servants; when they didn't have files to pore over, they just surfed the Net.

It was Rajiv Gandhi who set in motion the process of computerising the Central government, the PMO in particular. All officials starting from his principal secretary to those at the director level were provided with computers for storing and analysing sensitive data on a whole gamut of national and international issues. The computers also helped ensure continuity in governance by keeping track of all impending vacancies that required to be filled. According to the cabinet secretariat, there are about 5,000 officials whose appointments need prime ministerial ratification every year. They include all secretaries at the Centre, chairmen and directors of all PSUs, members of statutory bodies like the Reserve Bank of India Board and judges of the Supreme Court and the various high courts. Normally, the process of appointment is initiated by the concerned ministry but the PMO nevertheless keeps a close watch.But surprisingly, even after a decade of computerisation, the PMO doesn't have a complete list of its officials, the nation's top scientists, economists or opinion-makers. Believe it or not, the BJP, which had set its eyes on South Block over 10 years ago, has no data bank even for filling political vacancies in semi-government institutions and various advisory bodies. The party depends on the good old telephone directory or its own network of retired civil servants to shortlist names to fill up various posts.

Last week, Vajpayee found to his horror that the hundreds of computers in the PMO had no record of some of the key appointments that the Government had to make in the near future. In fact, it was from the newspapers that the PMO came to know that the posts of the chairpersons of the National Commission on Women and Press Council of India had fallen vacant. Similarly, when the PMO wanted to check the antecedents of the various names recommended by the chief justice of India for the appointment of Supreme Court judges, there was no data available. It is ironic that in a country which boasts of being among the leading software producers in the world, there is no meaningful information network for the nation's chief executive. Vajpayee has now instructed his secretariat to feed in all relevant information into the computer network in the PMO within the next four weeks so that it can advise various ministries well in advance. Vajpayee has at last realised that information is indeed power.

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