Dubbed as the biggest bureaucratic reform initiative, the Union Cabinet Wednesday approved ‘Mission Karmayogi’, a new capacity-building scheme for civil servants aimed at upgrading the post-recruitment training mechanism of the officers and employees at all levels.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said this exercise will “radically” improve the government’s human resource management practices and asserted it will use state-of-the-art infrastructure to augment the capacity of civil servants.
Announcing the scheme, Union Minister Prakash Javadekar said officers and employees in the government will get an opportunity to improve their performance under the Mission Karmayogi. “Mission Karmayogi aims to prepare Indian civil servants for the future by making them more creative, constructive, imaginative, innovative, proactive, professional, progressive, energetic, enabling, transparent and technology-enabled,” he said.
How will Mission Karmayogi unfold?
Mission Karmayogi programme will be delivered by setting up a digital platform called iGOTKarmayogi. Empowered with specific role-competencies, a civil servant will be able to ensure efficient service delivery of the highest quality standards, the government said.
The platform will act as a launchpad for the National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building (NPCSCB), which will enable a comprehensive reform of the capacity building apparatus at the individual, institutional and process levels.
NPCSCB will be governed by the Prime Minister’s Human Resource Council, which will also include state Chief Ministers, Union Cabinet ministers and experts. This council will approve and review civil service capacity building programmes.
Besides this, there will be a Cabinet Secretary Coordination Unit comprising of select secretaries and cadre controlling authorities.
Also, there will be a Capacity Building Commission, which will include experts in related fields and global professionals. This commission will prepare and monitor annual capacity building plans and audit human resources available in the government.
Finally, there will be a wholly-owned Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), which will govern the iGOT-Karmayogi platform. It will be set up under Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013.
The SPV will be a “not-for-profit” company and will own and manage iGOT-Karmayogi platform. The SPV will create and operationalise the content, market place and manage key business services of iGOT-Karmayogi platform, relating to content validation, independent proctored assessments and telemetry data availability. The SPV will own all Intellectual Property Rights on behalf of the Government of India.
How will it be funded?
To cover around 46 lakh central employees, a sum of Rs 510.86 crore will be spent over a period of 5 years from 2020-21 to 2024-25. The expenditure is partly funded by multilateral assistance to the tune of $50 million.
Besides the setting up of the SPV, an appropriate monitoring and evaluation framework will also be put in place for performance evaluation of all users of the iGOT-Karmayogi platform so as to generate a dashboard view of Key Performance Indicators.
Source: Indian Express, 3/09/20
