CM BSY office to go slick after flak from all quarters

Under pressure to get things going, Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa's office will be overhauled in line with the Prime Minister's Office as part of which files will be cleared in under two days, if not within hours.

The streamlining process kicked in Friday with officials from the CMO, Karnataka's highest executive office, cracking the whip by hectic follow-ups on the status of files.

That the CMO should be made slick was the result of a meeting chaired by the chief minister's additional chief secretary P Ravikumar on Thursday.

The overhaul comes amid complaints that the administration had slowed down, with Yediyurappa facing flak from all quarters. It is also reported that the BJP's central leadership is not very happy with the government's functioning.

Talks are on with the National Informatics Centre to implement the Letter Monitoring System (LMS), a secretariat tool that will introduce a paperless ecosystem in the CMO to help authorities check and track the status of instructions issued by Yediyurappa.

"Say, a legislator submits a request seeking the transfer of an official. It takes about two days for it to get out of this office and more to reach the department concerned. The current system takes up to 15 days for a proposal forwarded by the CMO," a senior official said.

Under the LMS, files coming into the CMO are digitised and virtually sent to the head of the department concerned with the click of a button. "All secretaries have access to the system already. We can monitor from here what action they've taken on the file sent by the CMO," the officer said. "The point is, whether the file is accepted or rejected, it must be done the same day or the next."

This will also apply to grievances Yediyurappa will receive from the public. On average, the chief minister collects 6,000 requisitions from citizens across the state in a year through Janata Darshan events.

Authorities hope that with the streamlining of the CMO, both citizens and legislators won't have to run from pillar to post to get their work done.

As part of the revamp, the responsibility of overseeing works pertaining to key government departments has been distributed among senior officials and the CM's special officers. It is also speculated that some officers will be replaced to boost efficiency.

Also, plans are afoot to do away with the e-janaspandana portal, the state's own public grievance management system, by integrating it with the Centre's Centralised Public Grievance Redress And Monitoring System (CPGRAMS).