New Delhi, April 21 (ANI): Addressing participants at the 8th Civil Services Day function here on Sunday, the Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, urged bureaucrats and other government employees to to build environment of creativity, entrepreneurship and enterprise.
Emphasising the fact that these are challenging times for the government and the bureaucracy, Dr. Singh said he felt it was his responsibility to highlight issues that were not necessarily within the purview of civil servants, but were of "particular relevance to the functioning of our Civil Services in the present difficult times."
Congratulating the civil servants whose work was being honored, Dr. Singh said India's rapid progress depended critically on its ability to be innovative and enterprising in a diverse range of areas, particularly in the field of public administration.
Complementing the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances for bringing out a compilation of 14 good governance initiatives from various parts of our country titled "Thinking out of the Box", Dr. Singh said: "Making the civil services fit for the future requires efforts in many dimensions."
Accepting that the role of the government has undergone a major transformation in many sectors of the economyover the past two decades, the Prime Minister said: "We have moved far away from the command and control economy of the earlier times."
"Ensuring good governance and managing the economy today are extremely complex tasks. How to ensure that our civil services have the required sets of skills to manage this complexity is a major challenge before us. I would urge you to consider ways and means of meeting this challenge," he said.
"I would also like to emphasize here, that officers in the civil services need to be provided top class training early in their careers to equip them with the tools necessary to understand the underlying logic and complexities of governance and having good systems in place," he added.
He said that another issue that will determine how fit the Indian civil services are for the future is whether there is effective system in place to incentivize innovation and remove inefficiency.
"We could perhaps learn from best practices across the world how such a system could be evolved," Dr. Singh said.
"Providing access to basic services to our people is one of the primary responsibilities of any modern Government. Our citizens need access to quality education, quality health services at affordable costs, provision of safe drinking water, sanitation and so on. And in providing these services we have to take special care of the needs of those sections of the society which are socially and economically backward and under privileged. We must recognize that we have a lot of work to do to bring the delivery of some of our basic public services up to the requisite standards," the Prime Minister said.
He said that the Right of Citizens for Time Bound Delivery of Goods and Services and Redressal of their Grievances Bill, 2011 is under consideration of Parliament.
"This, when enacted, will give our citizens the right to receive specified goods and services in a time bound manner. It is encouraging that several states have also taken the initiative to enact similar laws for their own states," he said.
He also said that the government has made sustained efforts to curb corruption, enhance transparency and accountability in the work of public authorities.
He referred to the Right to Information Act, the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Bill and the Whistleblowers Protection Bill as examples of this initiative.
"These are intended to also help in improving the standards of delivery of public services in our country," Dr. Singh said.
He, however, cautioned that standardized solutions for improving the delivery of public services might not always work, and therefore added, that there is a need to make full use of new and modern technology not only in the delivery of public services but in governance in general.
In this regard, he spoke of the benefits of the Aadhar program for providing all the residents of our country a unique identity, and also the Direct Benefits Transfer scheme based on Aadhar numbers.
"The Direct Benefits Transfer scheme now covers 121 districts of our country. It will lead to better targeting of subsidies and reducing delays in the delivery of benefits such as scholarships and pensions to the intended beneficiaries. It will also help in curbing wastages and leakages, and result in greater financial inclusion," Dr. Singh said.
He said programs like the Direct Benefits Scheme give a sense of empowerment to the people, increase their faith in the processes of governance, and therefore, have a far larger positive effect than can be measured by the direct advantages they confer. (ANI)
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