MP babus accustomed to Chouhan’s easy ways

‘Shivraj Chouhan left executive decisions to a small group of senior bureaucrats’.

With the exit of the Kamal Nath-led Congress government from Madhya Pradesh, bureaucrats in the state will now breathe easy.

When Kamal Nath took over as the Chief Minister in December 2018, the first challenge that he faced, among many others, was the lackadiscal and laidback attitude of the state bureaucrats, who had become accustomed to the ways of former Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who preferred leaving decisions like which file to sign and when to sign to a small trusted group of bureaucrats.

“Chouhan preferred meeting people, going out of Bhopal and would leave executive decisions to a small group of senior bureaucrats. Kamal Nath, on the other hand, liked sitting in his office and was very much adept at handling bureaucrats and was aware of the shortcuts that they would take to fool their bosses. He would remember the files he had seen and signed and would seek their update randomly. Files moved very quickly, sometimes passing through 5-6 desks in a single day and the order concerned being issued the same day. That is likely to change with Chouhan coming back to power, unless he has changed his way of handling the bureaucrats,” a spokesperson of a government department told The Sunday Guardian from Bhopal. Kamal Nath, soon after joining office, made sure that the bureaucrats started coming to Vallabh Bhawan, the state secretariat, at 9 am, a time which he himself also adhered to. “He would stay in office till 8 pm to 9 pm and had the habit of summoning bureaucrats without any prior intimation. Since the CM would be in his office till 9 pm and he had made it known that he could summon anyone even at 8 pm, none of the top officials left before him. Obviously, they were not happy,” a veteran journalist who is a frequent visitor to Vallabh Bhawan said. Kamal Nath had also the support of former twotime CM Digvijaya Singh, who is known for his deep knowledge of the working style of every senior serving bureaucrats in the state. “Like

Kamal Nath, Digvijaya kept a tight hold on the bureaucracy when he was the CM in the 1990s. Most bureaucrats who are in top positions in the state now, served under Singh during their formative years and hence Singh knew who was inefficient and who was not. The bureaucracy had come under total control of the legislature for the 15 months when Kamal Nath was the CM,” a retired Bhopal-based bureaucrat said.