Call for separate Arunachal cadre

Arunachal Pradesh chief minister Pema Khandu has made a strong pitch for separate IAS, IPS and IFS cadres for better development of the state. It’s not just the CM, but apparently, the state BJP too favours separate cadres for bureaucrats in the state. Compounded by the fact that many IAS officers are reluctant to serve in the Northeast, the chief minister’s concern about the quality of administration requires attention.

Mr Khandu’s main gripe is that officials sent from Delhi to serve in Arunachal Pradesh come for a short duration. By the time they come to grips with the system, they are transferred, causing a drain of knowledge and slowing down the working of the state administration. A separate state civil service cadre, they believe, at the top, would create a sense of ownership and responsibility and make the administration more responsive to the needs of the state.

It’s not clear whether the Centre will be receptive to the chief minister’s demand. Yet, in the recent months, there have been attempts by the government to liberalise service rules to make the Northeast more attractive to UT cadre officials who get posted to Arunachal Pradesh and other Northeastern states.

Weeding out the corrupt
In June and then in August, the Modi sarkar compulsorily retired 64 tax officials, including commissioner-rank officials, on various charges, including corruption. But the Centre’s drive against corruption in babudom is not limited to tax officials, as reported in this column earlier. The government is believed to be examining and reviewing the annual confidential reports of all employees, particularly those facing criminal or corruption charges.

Sources say that the Centre has directed all cadre-controlling authorities to establish a procedure to identify such officials and compulsorily retire them. The states too have been asked to prepare lists of officials facing serious charges. Similarly, the ministry of personnel, which controls the IAS cadre, is believed to be preparing a list of “tainted” babus for their removal from service, in a phased manner. The central investigative agencies such as the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), National Investigation Agency (NIA) and Enforcement Directorate (ED) are reportedly identifying corrupt officials for action against them.

The Centre’s determined war against corruption has sent jitters down the babu corridors but will win kudos from the public if the deadwood is indeed weeded out of the system.

A Nobel connection
As the nation celebrates the announcement of this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics to Abhijit Banerjee as one of the three recipients, senior IPS officer Neena Singh is being feted for authoring two research papers with the Nobel Laureate.

Neena Singh is a 1989-batch IPS officer of the Rajasthan cadre. Her joint work with the Nobel Laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo is titled “The Efficient Deployment of Police Resources: Theory and New Evidence from a Randomised Drunk Driving Crackdown in India” was published last month. It calls for the dispersed model of police deployment rather than the intense “hot spot” model. It advocates that rotating police checkpoints reduces night accidents by 17 per cent and night deaths by 25 per cent. Fixed checkpoints have no significant effect, the paper says.