CANDID ACTION
| Date :20-Jun-2019 |
THE Central Government has done well to continue with the process of removing inefficient or corrupt officers from all-India cadre. The step to retire 15 officers of Revenue and Tax Departments prematurely marks the second phase of the Centre’s ongoing programme of scrutinising and monitoring the performance of officers on a continuous basis. Some time ago, the Centre had sacked as many as 12 officers from the Administrative and Police Services, to make a no-nonsense beginning of a cleansing drive. There is every reason to believe that such a programme will make a lot of positive difference in the sense the entire officialdom will get the right message that they have to perform without corruption. In fact, such a programme should have been undertaken decades earlier so that the anti-corruption movement would have acquired an official dimension and certain seriousness. No matter the delay, the step is certainly welcome on more counts than one even at this stage.
The Government had not given wide publicity to the names of the 12 officers who were made to take a premature retirement after having been found guilty of either non-performance or of corrupt practices. This time, however, it made the whole nation know who the sacked officers were, thus sending across to the people in general and government employees in particular the message that it would tolerate no corruption. The second-phase removals will send a stern warning to all the officialdom that it cannot take the Government for granted. Frankly, this was the message that was so sorely missing from the Government’s parlance for decades. Officers at all levels -- the bureaucracy -- were taking the system for granted and felt sure that there would never be anybody to touch them and take action against their non-performance or corrupt practices.
That unholy confidence in the refusal of the system to take cognisance of inept officers a lot of brazenness and wilfulness to defy norms of morally correct conduct. The strict action in two phases will send the right message to the officialdom across the country that the Government would tolerate no nonsense. In fact, such an action has been the nation’s unequivocal demand for decades. Because of such officers, the common people, too, were forced into corrupt practices. In that manner, the whole system got corrupted as if beyond redemption. By any standard that was a dangerous situation for which the Government seemed to have no specific answers or solutions.
Or at least the people felt so. The people grieved, too, when they read news reports from across the world that the governments of the respective countries sent corrupt and inept officials to gaol and extracted from them large sums of money that were so totally disproportionate to their incomes. Their feeling was of disgust that the Government was not taking the right action to teach a lesson to the wrong kind of officers. That disgust would now dissipate by itself as the Government seems intent upon continuing with this drive. The nation’s fight against graft, thus, will get a strong booster dose through such a drive.
It is expected that the Government would operate a strong internal system of scrutiny of officers and their performance, first at the level of all-India cadres and then extending the drive to other layers of the bureaucracy. There is a well-argued, wide-spread belief that a lot of corruption takes place with political blessings. At some later stage, the Government will have to take a note of this reality, too, and start taking appropriate action to weed out corruption at that level. Such a move would shake the system to its core and mark a truly serious dimension of the nation’s fight against corruption and inefficiency. The nation now waits for that stage.