Hindustan Times: New
Delhi: Wednesday, April 10, 2013.
Three years
ago, the Manmohan Singh government started evaluating the performance of
central ministries. Now, an RTI appeal filed by HT may force it to make their
report cards public.
Chief
information commissioner Satyananda Mishra on Tuesday directed the UPA
government to release the assessments. The ruling came on a Right to
Information appeal filed by HT against the cabinet secretariat’s decision to
treat the report cards as a secret on the grounds that they were yet to be
placed before the cabinet, and were thus exempted from the RTI. The government
has 15 working days to comply.
The exercise,
aimed at improving the government’s efficiency by fixing accountability, was
launched in 2009.
Inspired by
management guru Peter Drucker’s principle ‘what gets measured, gets done’ it assessed the performance of 72 central ministries and departments against
targets fixed at the beginning of each year.
The scores
were to be made public on June 1 every year, but the cabinet secretariat’s
performance management division didn’t stick to the plan, reportedly over
concerns that it could embarrass ministers whose departments fared poorly.
Mishra said
the intention to place the documents before the cabinet first “cannot be a
shield against disclosure of this nature”.
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