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STATES: WEST BENGAL
Non-Working Class Reform
The new Government has launched a culture-breaking
initiative to discipline government employees even at the cost of offending
the unions
By Sumit Mitra
The CPI(M) is supposed
to be a party of sweaty workers. But it has a special corner for the Group
C employees-those clerks rendered surplus by computers in every department.
Its most visible inmates, forming nearly 70 per cent of all Central and
state government employees, they constitute the bulk of the Marxists'
union strength too. In West Bengal, the Coordination Committee of State
Government Employees, whose members are mostly drawn from Group C, has
a special status, as though it were a state within the state.
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RIGHT TURN: Slothful clerks in Writers'
Buildings will wake-up to a new regime when Chief Minister Bhattacharya
(left) introduces smart cards for efficiency
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On May 13, after being sworn in as the state's
chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya attended a Coordination Committee
reception just as his predecessor Jyoti Basu did each time he began a
new term at Writers' Buildings. Underlying the bonhomie, however, is a
growing awareness that the CPI(M), like all parties in governance, has
resolved to increase the efficiency of the administration, at the cost
of offending the Coordination Committee if necessary. To address the basic
problem of irregular attendance, the newly elected state Government is
shortly going to invite tenders for nearly 20,000 "smart cards"
for secretarial staff. Manab Mukherjee, minister for information technology,
says that the card will not only record attendance but also contain "a
basket of data" on the employee's performance and salary.
That is a clever beginning to discipline a tribe
that has become a law unto itself. Over three lakh state government clerks
(of 4,37,100 employees) are required to enter the index numbers of files
received and those forwarded each day into a work diary. But nobody maintains
the diary, except a few in the ministerial backrooms. Samarajit Roychowdhury,
general secretary of the Coordination Committee, says that the diary system
has become "obsolete since 1977", the year the CPI(M)-led Left
Front came to power.
Anxious not to lose its initiative in improving
employees' output, the Government now wants to revive the diary system.
It is also drawing up an e-governance programme for better monitoring.
The first e-governance network, to be in place by October, will connect
all state government units in Kolkata and link the capital's hub with
the 18 districts. While Tata Infotech is to set up the network, the Government
is shopping around for a software that can reduce its employees' interface
with the public. Planning and Development Minister Nirupam Sen, regarded
as No. 2 in the Bhattacharya Cabinet, refers to e-governance as a "tool
to improve efficiency". It's an attitudinal sea-change, from the
CPI(M)'s Luddite thinking as late as the 1980s which banned computers
in government offices and agitated against its use in other offices too.
Behind closed doors, the party's ideologues
regret having allowed too much politics permeates the administration.
Sen, 55, recalls that in the Fourth Pay Commission report in 1999 the
state's latest, employees' salaries were revised "on the condition
that they would be productive and accountable".
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