India wields club on golfing bureaucrats

NEW DELHI: India’s right-wing government has scrapped membership of Delhi’s prestigious golf club for bureaucrats as part of a crackdown on its notoriously work-shy civil servants, a report said Thursday. The memberships had been awarded to a select group of serving and retired bureaucrats by the previous left-leaning Congress government, the Hindustan Times daily said. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has now scrapped the perk, canceling memberships for 27 civil servants teeing off from the club’s plush greens and mulling the future of another 30. The newspaper said the quota scheme organized by the urban development ministry, which oversees the club’s land, was ended after it was found to be in “contravention of rules and regulations,” without elaborating. The Delhi Golf Club, which dates back to 1930, is spread over 200 acres in the heart of the city with sprawling greens interspersed by Mughal-era ruins.