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Three Virtues - Good Governance or of a Good Officer

 Three Virtues - Good Governance or of a Good Officer

Mr Chander Shekhar, IAS (Retd) and I had a good chat yesterday. We got talking of good governance, the attitudinal issues of certain government officers, the varied cultures in States and some with a deep sense of feudalism and entitlement. It need not be just the bureaucracy as we know it but even statutory organisations or the varied departments. Some unknowingly give out their biases in meeting the poorer sections or the average person. Or just don’t reach out.
Ultimately as pointed out by Mr Chander Shekar, it does boil down simply to -
Availability
Accessibility
Credibility.
You should be available consistently but not isolated. Don’t keep working through intervening layers but do reach out and speak and interact directly. Get to know people and do visit sites and projects directly but preferably without letting the paraphernalia which comes along to be a barrier. Hence the accessibility.,And your actions and follow up have to be credible and consistently. Even if it’s the use of the stick or the law and order machinery, it must be such that it only amplifies the credibility of the action. And this applies even within with your own staff and offices.Know their needs and barriers too. And take action within your ambit for it.
We can build any number of theories around this subject but these three attributes go to its heart and soul. That is the crux of the matter. This is the framework to build good governance.
But to add - this should ultimately lead to the attainment- of goals and with an output and outcome matrix with effectiveness and efficiency. That data is missing in this kind of discussion and I acknowledge that, but these are the essential attributes. In this pandemic period, I have read or browsed through the books of some of our prominent civil servants. This is the missing link. How much success they could achieve with hard and soft indicators. That is missing. Instead we get incidents. They do have a Result framework matrix . That should be added too.
DKK
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Jatinder Singh, Shailendra Jayal and 4 others

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