Narendra Modi holds meeting with ministers to firm up contours of 100-day agenda

NEW DELHI: With the first Parliament session of the 16th Lok Sabha set to kick off on Wednesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a long meeting with his council of ministers on Monday evening to discuss the government's action plan for the first 100 days as well as its mission statement that would be conveyed in President Pranab Mukherjee's address to the joint session of Parliament on June 9.

The PM is learnt to have asked all ministers to submit a status report on their departments' ongoing initiatives and projects by June 6 at the nearly three-hour long meeting, the first such to be held in the PM's Race Course Road office.

After the meeting of the 45-member ministerial council, the PM is expected to have meetings with secretaries of all major departments on Tuesday.

Officials across ministries were busy giving final touches to the presentations that secretaries have to make to the Prime Minister. While the 100-day agenda and the medium term and long-term goals are likely to feature in the presentations, more importantly, secretaries have been asked to answer three major questions about their departments' initiatives in the UPA government — what went wrong, what decision led to things going wrong, and if you would had been given the authority, what would you have done differently?

In less than a week in office, Modi has already held two cabinet meetings, apart from Monday's meeting with the full ministerial council.

Ministers have been asked to keep ten governance mantras in mind during their day-to-day functioning and ensure a focus on effective implementation in the delivery of public services as well as projects and policies that the government unfolds. In a separate development, the external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj along with foreign secretary Sujata Singh met Modi.

Earlier in the day, Bharat Ratna CNR Rao, scientific advisor to former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also called on Prime Minister Modi at his South Block office. The meeting, officials said, was just a courtesy call.