Administrative Reforms Commission submits report to CM Siddaramaiah

Bengaluru: Chairman of the Second Administrative Reforms Commission T. M. Vijayabhaskar submitted the commission’s report to Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Monday. Prasanna Kumar, member secretary of the commission was present. In February last year, the commission had submitted the second and third report of the administrative reform commission to the then CM Basavaraja Bommai.

The report included recommendations for rural development and panchayat raj, urban development, energy, social welfare, welfare of scheduled classes, development of backward classes, welfare of minorities and local government departments.

The commission recommended the Creation of ‘Unnecessary Expenditure Prevention Task Force’ to prevent unnecessary expenditure in various departments of the State Government, Corporation Board etc. The other recommendations of the commission are as follows:

• The files of any department should not move more than three or four levels in the Government Ministry. At present the files are circulating in 5-10 levels in the state.

• Act can be implemented to do the transfer of Group-C and D employees suggested by all the departments through computerized counselling.

• At present post offices are providing services of Govt of India. All post offices in the state can be used to provide state government services.

• The state can use Common Service Centers (CSC) set up by Village Level Entrepreneurs (VLE) on a larger scale to provide door-to-door government and non-government services.

• Greater power to grant government land worth not exceeding Rs.5 crore free of charge with exemption of conversion fee.

• Department of Public Enterprises (DPE) may be merged with Department of Finance.

• Payment of compensation for land acquisition should be time-bound. If payment is not made on time, additional compensation will need to be paid for the delayed period. Compensation should be processed as Aadhaar based payment so that fraud in payment of compensation through check can be prevented.

• Performance appraisal form of officers and staff has been revised and action can be taken accordingly.

• Implementation of management and evaluation system and evaluation of departments.

• To improve the index of the state at the national level, steps can be taken to form a committee to analyse, improve and monitor multi-sector, zonal indices and publish the ranks of districts and taluks based on these indices.

• Draft bid document e-procurement before calling the highest value tenders. Objections may be invited by publication through the website.

• The departments should record their decisions on the objections and only after that the bid document should be finalised.

• All the departments are deputing the staff on outsourcing basis and not adopting any kind of reservation system while deputing, it is seen that the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Classes are being inconvenienced.

• The commission report had all these ideas that the government can issue appropriate orders to assign necessary representation to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Classes while deputing staff on outsourcing basis.