New ministers rooms being refurbished
Surjit kumar Dhal,BHUBANESWAR, JUNE 7: As many as fourteen ministers who have got berths in the recently formed State Cabinet are said to be in an awkward situation as they fail to come to their respective offices due to ongoing refurbishment.
Out of the 20 ministers in the Cabinet, 14 are completely new and six were members in the last Cabinet.
The new ministers have been allotted offices in the ministers’ corridor and the rest six have been allotted their respective previous offices where they have started functioning.
The offices of the new ministers are under a process of refurbishment, including change of floor tiles and their office furniture and fixtures as it happens once in every five years. It will take long time before the work is completed.
The computers and other accessories of each of the 14 offices have already been removed for the purpose.
In the Union Cabinet as each office of a minister is under the control of the concerned department, it creates no problem for new ministers to take office and start work immediately.
However, in Odisha the system is different. The ministers don’t hold office in their departments. There is separate provision of office for the ministers in the second and the third floor of the State Secretariat, which are outside and away from their departments.
A few ministers have office facility in their departments, but while retaining the same they also occupy another office in the ministers’ corridor.
Responsibility of the ministers as regards their salary and other things are in the hands of the Parliamentary Department. But allotment of their offices and their refurbishing is not in this department’s control.
Senior bureaucrats have an opinion that were all this in the control of the Parliamentary Affairs Department, recurrence of the same problem wouldn’t happen.
Now the real problem for the new ministers is they have to work amidst uncertainty to meet the Chief Minister’s monthly target of progress in the implementation of election manifesto promises.
