Minister-bureaucrat friction a recurring theme in state
Three tiffs in last four months are being seen as a symptom of a deeper malady in the system
CHANDIGARH : The present standoff between social welfare and empowerment minister Sadhu Singh Dharamsot and his additional chief secretary (ACS) Kripa Shankar Saroj is not an isolated incident.
The friction between ministers and IAS officers – the two wheels of government – has become a recurrent theme in the present set-up. Already, there have been three instances since May where senior bureaucrats and their political bosses have locked horns, bringing into the open the old fault lines. And, chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh and his close aides have had to do the firefighting but not before these tiffs made the headlines.
The most-talked-about row was between Karan Avtar Singh, a 1984 batch IAS officer who has since retired and now heads the
Punjab Water Regulation and Development Authority, and some senior members of the state cabinet in May 2020. The ministers, led by finance minister Manpreet Singh badal and technical education minister Charanjit Singh Channi, had walked out of a pre-cabinet meeting protesting the chief secretary’s “rude behaviour” and demanded his removal.
A few Congress MLAs, who have been openly griping against the primacy of the bureaucracy every now and then, also jumped in to level personal allegations against the officer. The ministers called a truce only after the chief secretary apologised following the CM’s personal intervention. Tiff aside, both Manpreet and Karan Avtar are known to be soft-spoken persons with calm disposition. Last month, additional chief secretary Anurag Agarwal was transferred out of the health and family welfare department hours after his boss, health minister Balbir Singh Sidhu, had complained to the chief minister in a meeting of the state cabinet. Sidhu and Agarwal were at odds over the latter’s orders relating to dismissal of 22 lab technicians in Amritsar and the missing five crore tablets of de-addiction drug, buprenorphine nalaxone. In the latest case, Dharamsot and Kripa Shankar have serious differences over the administration of the post-matric scholarship scheme.
Though such friction is often attributed, in bureaucratic lexicon, to lack of coordination, these recurring instances, as one former chief secretary put it, are symptoms of a far deeper malady. The retired IAS officer, who has closely watched the state bureaucracy for five decades, said that friction has always been there, but it seems to be on the rise. “The problem is that politicians want to have their way and officers are becoming increasingly compliant. Whenever some officer stands up or refuses to comply once in a while, his or her actions are seen as an act of defiance. There is a code of conduct that every order by a superior has to be in writing. If this is implemented, most of these problems would be sorted out,” said the ex-bureaucrat who did not wish to be identified.
Another former chief secretary, Ramesh Inder Singh, said he does not know details of these latest incidents, but differences of opinion between ministers and officers is not something new. “These things happen due to a lack of communication within the system. And, the issue has to be addressed within the system,” he said. Subodh Chandra Agrawal, who served as CS from June 2009 to March 2012, said that unlike some states where political executives and officers are always daggers drawn, they have been working well together in Punjab. “These incidents in recent months are exceptions rather than the rule,” he added.