Top official brushes off Shashi Tharoor’s remarks on PMO centralisation

NEW DELHI: A top official in the Prime Minister’s Office has squarely dismissed Congress leader Shashi Tharoor’s charge that the Narendra Modi PMO’s penchant for ‘control’ is creating a bigger paralysis in the administration than the ‘alleged days of policy paralysis’ that had become the UPA government’s hallmark in its last few years. “There is no centralisation. All work is being done as per the allocation of business rules in the government. No files are stuck and everything is moving smoothly,” said PK Misra, additional principal secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office on the sidelines of a personnel ministry symposium on training public officials. Misra, a trusted official of Modi from his days as Gujarat chief minister, was responding to a query about Tharoor’s comments about decision making being centralised in the PM’s South Block office.

The allocation of business rules are made by the President to lay down the subject matters of policy and administration that each ministry or department is responsible for. Ministries are created by the President on the PM’s advice. “Everything is now controlled by the PMO. No one moves without an ‘okay’ from the PMO. Every file gets stuck in the PMO. There is a real worry about how much is going to get done,” Tharoor had remarked at a private event in the World Bank’s Washington headquarters. Though he applauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s articulation of individual national objectives that must be top priority for the government, Tharoor said that implementation would be the challenge.

“Modi has said a lot of the right things. The challenge is going to be in doing the right thing, which so far, in ten months, we haven’t seen him doing that,” the Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvanthapuram who was a junior minister in the Manmohan Singh government said.

Tharoor, who had come under fire from his Congress colleagues for calling Modi an ‘avatar of modernity and progress’ less than a month after the Lok Sabha polls decimated the UPA, said bureaucrats in the capital testified that they were actually much more paralysed now than they were thought to be in the “alleged days of policy paralysis under the UPA.” Decision making had slowed down dramatically in the UPA’s second innings, following a slew of investigations into alleged scandals that brought retired bureaucrats under scrutiny for decisions taken in service. Prime Minister Modi has sought to allay the bureaucracy’s fears and urged them to take bold decisions at the beginning of his tenure, reiterating the same at a recent meeting with all secretaries to the government where he urged ministries to consult each other regularly and eliminate silos.

“A communication gap in this team is absolutely untenable,” the PM told top bureaucrats on April 1, urging them to speed up decision making. Modi also assured them that the government is trying to ensure that officials have the freedom and protection for objective, honest decision-making.