Minimum government, maximum governance: PM Modi’s mantra to IAS probationers

Modi asks civil service probationers to work as team

Prime Minister Narendra Modi. File

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday exhorted civil service probationers to ensure the concept of “minimum government and maximum governance” in administration while cautioning them against developing “babu mindset” in the system.

 

Mr Modi said the aim of civil servants should be to empower the common man. He was speaking via video conferencing from the Statue of Unity site in Kevadiya in Gujarat to probationers at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie.

 

He said the young officers must take the decisions in the context of the nation’s interests and to strengthen the unity and integrity of the country. He stressed that the decisions taken by the civil servants should always be in the interest of the common man notwithstanding the scope of the department or the region in which they are working.

 

He also emphasized team work and told the probationers that when they work with the entire team, there will be more success and impact of their work on the district or department.

 

Mr Modi stressed that the focus of the “steel frame” of the country should not be merely in managing the daily affairs but in working for the progress of the nation. Reminding the newly recruited batch of civil servants about Sardar Patel’s philosophy on his 145th birth anniversary, he said “serving the citizens of the country is the highest duty of a civil servant.”

 

Another piece of advice the Prime Minister offered to the probationary officers was to not get obsessed with the media and social media. “It is good that your work gets covered in the media but one has to ensure that one does not work only for coverage in the media.”

 

According to Mr Modi, training is very important and therefore, the NDA government has given a new focus on providing training to impart new skill sets to the bureaucrats and public servants.

 

“Training plays a very important role but earlier, not much attention was paid to it. But now, we are paying a lot of attention to the human resource and the training aspect. You have seen how the training of civil services has transformed in the last 2 to 3 years. The government has started Mission Karmayogi, a new experiment in capacity building,” he added. He was referring to the government’s new initiatives like Mission Karmayogi or National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building, which is aimed at setting up of capacity building commission to harmonize training standards, create shared faculty and resources as well as having a supervisory role over all central training institutions.