The NaMo government, sworn into power on the promise of decisiveness, may have openly dole out with its predecessor UPA’s obsession for decision making using GoMs and EGoMs, but a little less than a month into its formation, it too has engineered its own alternate mechanism for handling inter-ministerial issues.
According to senior government officers, while the UPA’s favoured system of governance through GoMs and EGoMs (groups of ministers and empowered group of ministers) may have been scrapped, it is being slowly but surely being replaced by a formless system of ministerial clusters headed by one senior minister in charge of one of the so called “major” portfolios.
Not like the UPA systems, these clusters, each of which bands together several related portfolios, are both flexible and inter-changeable and have speed and efficiency at its core.
One such ministerial cluster increasingly and noticeably visible is headed by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, who has been slackly given charge of all related ministries, including ones such as power, coal, commerce and agriculture. He will coordinate all inter-ministerial issues like petroleum and inflation prices in the wake of Iraq crisis.
Likewise, highways, road and shipping minister Nitin Gadkari has been asked to supervise all infrastructure-related ministries, together with the ministries of railways and civil aviation.
Rajnath Singh, the Cabinet heavyweight and Home Minister could head another cluster comprising his own ministry and with defense ministry and the ministry of external affairs being part. The law and environment ministers could be called to meetings depending upon the issue to be discussed.
For example, Ram Vilas Paswan, Food, Public Distribution and consumer affairs minister chaired a meeting on Monday on the problems faced by sugarcane industry and agriculture pricing. It was attended by Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh, Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and also Gadkari.
“It is a formal system. The Cabinet Secretary has been attending the meetings along with officials of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and secretaries of the ministries concerned,” an officer confirmed.
Modi himself had chaired meetings with Jaitley and oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan on June 20, and again on June 22 to talk about the issue of price rise and hammer out an acceptable increase in natural gas prices.
“He (Modi) wants to decentralize and does not want the PMO to handle issues on a day-to-day basis.He wants senior ministers to coordinate on crucial issues. The system is still evolving,” a PMO official said.