Editorial
CA's call to bureaucracy
Service to the people must be the bottomline
The Chief Adviser has asked civil servants to fulfill their responsibilities to the people through ensuring a prompt delivery of services. That is truly an exhortation which resonates with the larger body of citizens. Indeed, the problems we have had with our bureaucracy are as old as the hills, to the extent that all our efforts to resolve them have yielded precious few results. That can mean only one thing, which is that a renewed and stronger emphasis must be placed on pulling the civil administration out of the sloth it has been in for years. The CA's call to the secretaries was for a simplification of the modus operandi of administration through dispensing with archaic rules and regulations.The concerns expressed by the CA must be addressed in dead earnest. For starters, it is hugely worrying that once a file enters a ministry, it must go through no fewer than nine layers of approval -- and a horrendously long time before it is finally cleared. That is a sordid symbol of the procrastination that characterises administration. Besides, there is an absence of ministerial coordination when it comes to dealing with issues of grave public concern. Obviously, the efficiency and pace at which government should work are clearly undermined by the way officialdom conducts itself. The picture which emerges is one of too many theoretical deliberations on the issues and too little work on the ground. As if that were not enough, the presence of an inordinately high number of officers on special duty (OSDs) in the various ministries has only sliced away at the capacity of an already resource-strapped government. The Chief Adviser's call for absorption of the OSDs in the ministries should be followed up by action. As for promotions, it has been seen that big chunks of officers are elevated to such positions as deputy secretaries and joint secretaries without anyone having any idea of exactly where these officials with all their given antecedents will fit in. Another problem the bureaucracy has suffered from lately relates to the political partisanship it was pushed into by a ruling political class that should have known better. A clear idea of how civil administration can be undercut from within comes in the allegations of corruption around the conduct of the 27th Bangladesh Civil Service examinations. In these different, perhaps even tumultuous times, with all the lessons learnt, a good opportunity exists for administration to be turned into a dynamic machine geared to the promotion of the public weal. In its own interest, and owing to the absence of parliament, the administration ought to establish and maintain links with the media as a way of keeping people abreast of the reform measures it plans to take. An efficient, non-partisan and professional civil service is the ultimate bedrock on which government functions. Let that be the principle we follow unwaveringly.
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