NOT RED TAPE, IT’S DEAD TAPE STALKING STATE SECRETARIAT!

Mumbai: Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray was emphatic while recently awarding the Rajeev Gandhi awards for good governance about the need to eliminate red tape in the administration.

Now consider this: Maharashtra’s former additional chief secretary (Home), Chitkala Zutshi, who retired in 2009 has been waiting to be reimbursed for over a year now after her husband Raj Kumar (also a retired IAS officer) was admitted to a Nagpur hospital facility after contracting COVID-19 in 2021.

Zutshi told First India, “The fact is both my husband (in 2006) and I (in 2009) enrolled under the Union government-run Central Government Health Scheme (CGHS) and paid Rs18,000 each. While the scheme entitles beneficiaries to cashless medical treatment at empanelled hospitals in India, we were compelled to pay Rs2.6 lakh at a Nagpur facility for my husband’s treatment and are still awaiting the reimbursement of the same for more than a year now. Red tape appears to be entrenched into our bureaucracy.”

Zutshi (then ACS finance), incidentally was awarded the Rajeev Gandhi award in 2007 after her efforts to curb fiscal extravagance resulted in two straight years when salary expenditure in Maharashtra was brought down by fresh appointments in revenue departments like sales tax and a few thousand retrenchments in the irrigation department posts. Ironically, the Rs5 lakh cash component of the award was never shared with the state finance department as she had instructed.

While Zutshi’s experience pertains to the Union government, several Congress, NCP and even some Shiv Sena ministers, MPs and MLAs, allege that their experience (read: correspondence to the CMO) over the past few months have met with a similar fate--no response.

A very senior Congress leader who has served as minister in New Delhi as well as Maharashtra tells India First, “It appears that the CMO is being run by a motley crew of bureaucrats who have been calling the shots ever since the Chief Minister had taken ill and required surgical intervention for a spinal condition. Have Chief Ministerial duties been outsourced to select IAS officers?”

Enquiries with the CMO despatch section located on the ground floor of the state secretariat indicate that correspondences made to the CMO for the last seven months have failed to elicit any response from the CMO, neither in the form of remarks or any indication regarding the outcome of the sought assistance. It must be pointed out here that immediately after recovering from his surgery CM Uddhav Thackeray had undertaken a blitzkrieg of clearing files with 500 plus files cleared in quick time over a couple of months back.

Even VIP correspondence from alliance ministers like Jayant Patil of the NCP, Sena MLAs Sunil Prabhu and Ravindra Waikar, Minister of state for health, Yedravkar besides scores of common citizens have remained unanswered. Even ministerial recommendations for personnel preferences and even allotment of staff quarters for their staffers have met with a rebuff from the general administration department (GAD) that even issued a notice advising against any such recommendations.

It has been several months since any visitor to the CMO has managed an audience with the head of Maharashtra’s political dispensation. A couple of days back the state government issued instructions to permit entry of common citizens into Mantralaya from May 18. Things are finally likely to start moving faster in the state secretariat, it is expected.