First day in office, Badal asks babus to be ‘civil’

The message was loud and clear – civil servants must perform and be civil, or get ready to be booted out. Addressing a meeting of Financial Commissioners and Administrative Secretaries here this morning, Punjab chief ministers Parkash Singh Badal said; “I expect you to remember that you are called civil servants and that ‘civil’ is the first part of this nomenclature. Where the people are concerned, you must be well-behaved and treat yourselves as their servants.”

Badal said that his government would expect the bureaucracy to understand that in a democratic set-up, civil servants are “mere tools for the implementation of the people’s will” as expressed through their elected representatives. The CM said he would personally review the performance of each department on a regular basis.

The Chief Minister declared that there would be a ‘high premium’ on performance and that accessibility, responsiveness and accountability to the people would be the cardinal components of the new government’s vision of governance. Badal said the time has come for civil servants to comprehensively reorient their approach.