GOVERNANCE
field
report bureaucracy
Secretaries with the Centre visit the place of their first posting
to record changes over the decades and submit their recommendations to the state
governments
On
January 22 this year, when Ashok Lavasa, Secretary, Ministry of Environment and
Forests, visited Mahendragarh, an arid town in South Haryana where he served as
Sub-Divisional Magistrate (SDM) from 1982 to 1985, he could barely recognise
the place. It hardly matched the ‘frozen-in-time image’ he had had in his mind
all these years.
For one, government employees who
worked in the SDM office then, had retired. The building which served as his
office in Maratha Fort had been abandoned. A water-harvesting structure in
Madhogarh Fort, built by a Rajput ruler in the 18th century, about 12 km from
the town, had dried up and undergrowth had left no trace of the 30-feet
rainwater pool it once held. To top it all, the town, which only had 14,000
people in the 1980s, had bulged to over double.
No comments:
Post a Comment