Live and responsive conscience is the first quality of an efficient and competent officer. Before anything else one has to be answerable to one’s conscience. The conscience appears mute but it is vocal provided one is not a dud. Senior administrative officers are an intelligent and innovative lot and of course, highly conscious. However, the law of nature is such that even a good practice gets rusted and blunt by over use. Perhaps this is applicable to our bureaucrats.
The Government felt the need of monitoring, advising and guiding the departments in tasks of general good, be it a policy matter or a specific State run or Centre run project. Therefore, in 2017 the Government constituted several committees with the specific advice that these will monitor the progress of the developmental work and function as liaison between the Government and the executing agency. In some cases no time schedule was indicated but in other cases the time schedule was also there. More than a year has passed since these committees were constituted. But what is the take from them? It is almost zero. These committees are almost decorative or ornamental and have not moved even a blade of grass that could be mentioned as their performance. That is why we say the foremost condition of a public servant is a live and vibrant consciousness. If these members of the committees that have been constituted and headed by senior bureaucrats had an iota of consciousness towards the society or towards themselves, they would not have let down the Government in a way they have done. Let us name some of these: State-level Distribution Reforms Committee, committees for implementation of Special Package for development of sports infrastructure, committee for overseeing and implementation of content regulation of Government advertisements in the State in the light of Supreme Court directions, committee to review and monitor the implementation of environmental laws in the State, committee to ensure revision of rent of Wakaf properties and committee to frame a policy for providing accommodation to the legislators by the Estates Department as well as J&K Legislative Assembly Secretariat in the MLA Hostels. The list is long one and we cannot afford to name each and every committee owing to paucity of space.
If there were one or two or even three defaulting committees, we might say that somewhere sabotaging act is involved. It is a mass defiance or mass negligence that is at work. The disappointing thing is that even in such departments as are directly in the charge of the Chief Minister, this defiance of sorts prevails. How can one explain such afflicted administrative arrangement in the State? Projects are abandoned half way; projects are delayed beyond expectation; noise is raised about paucity of funds, complaints are made about some functionaries indulging in negative and underhand activities so forth and so on. If the Government is serious that these committees should become functional the responsibility should be placed on the departmental head to pursue the committee concerned to hold periodic meetings.
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