Ishtiyaq Ahmad
Early Times Report
SRINAGAR, Dec 8: All it seems that heads of departments do not want to make any transparency into functioning in their respective departments. This could be gauged that directives issued by government to bureaucrats in last three years decades to make "responsive and transparency" in governance" have not been implemented.
Since 2017, government has announced several measures to make the administration accountable. However, there has been poor response from the officials to the government's directives.
One such directive was submission of annual and monthly progress report card of their departments by the administrative secretaries, heads of the departments, and district development commissioners (DDCs) to the government. It was aimed to review the performance of officials. An official of the General Administration Department said that departmental heads are not submitting the monthly report card to the government.
"Most of the departments have also failed to submit results framework document (RFD) for several years," the official said.
The JK government launched the RFD aimed to judge the performance of departments and to bring transparency in their functioning.
As per the guidelines, the administrative secretaries have to evaluate performance of their departments under RFD on the basis of timeline completion of targets, outcomes of the schemes, priorities fixed, quality of work done and status of benefits of projects.
In September last year, the government directed departments to submit the details regarding major developmental activities and achievements to the Governor Secretariat every month.
"It is further requested that the hence forth monthly information on the subject be furnished to the Principal Secretary to the Government Planning and Development for consolidation and its onward submission to the Principal Secretary to Governor by 3rd of every month," the circular issued reads. The government has also directed the departments to hold parallel enquiries against tainted officials, in addition to probe being held by anti-graft bodies. However, nothing such is being followed.
"Even if the departmental head is aware of any fraud, he is not acting on his own and remains dependent on anti-graft bodies for the probe," the official said. Similarly, the departmental heads have been directed to put requisite information on the websites so that people should not visit the offices "unnecessary" instead get the information from the websites. "However, the departments have been ignoring these directives instead keeping websites defunct or not updated," the official said. Similarly, the district development commissioners were directed creation of WhatsApp groups. The official said that few DDCs have created the Whatsapp groups but could not continue due to their transfers. |
