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Homeless Home Secretary

Paucity of official bungalows in the state capital is proving to be a major problem for officers returning to the state from Central or any other outside postings.



Paucity of official bungalows in the state capital is proving to be a major problem for officers returning to the state from Central or any other outside postings. While many of the officers are occupying the ministerial bungalows allotted to them during the Congress regime, others, who have retired or have been posted out, are yet to vacate the houses. Some of the bungalows have been allotted to the Officers on Special Duty (OSD) with the Chief Minister and others in the CMO.Search is on to look for a house for Manoj Kumar, Additional Chief Secretary, Home, who returned from a Central posting almost two months back. Though he is staying with his wife, who is from the Indian Postal Services in her accommodation, he is still awaiting the allotment of a suitable house. “When the Home Secretary himself is still homeless, what can the others expect,” remarked an official as frantic efforts are on to allocate official accommodation to all.

‘Babus need to be responsive’ 

If the buzz on social media is to be believed than ‘babus’ will now have to be active on Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and other such platform for better redress of grievances or complaints posted by the public. Though there is no official order for bureaucrats to follow this “new diktat”, the twitterati is abuzz that the “thick-skinned babus” must be responsive to the issues concerning the public and take action. The argument is that if something comes to their knowledge from whichever medium, they are expected to act and not wait for orders from higher ups. After all, if Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur and Chief Secretary BK Aggarwal and others are active on social media, why cannot babus be active and respond to the public complaints regarding delivery of services, asks a social media freak. But there are others who say that once ‘babus’ are active on social media they will spend more time on surfing and thumbing through the messages on social media rather than doing substantial work for the public. Even though Aggarwal says there is no official direction that officials need to be active on social media people feel it is high time they became responsive to people’s problems.

Feuding document writers

The document writers in the Dharamsala tehsil official created a scene this week, fighting and even hurling chairs at each other. During this fight, a lady, who had come for some work in the tehsil, was injured as an object thrown by warring document writers hit her on the head. The tehsildar called the police and the lady was shifted to a hospital. However, instead of taking action against the document writers the police helped them reach a compromise. Sources said that fight between document writers in Dharamsala tehsil office has become a routine affair. The document writers fight over their probable customers in the tehsil office. The officials in the office are perturbed over the behaviour of document writers and have brought the matter to the notice of district administration, but no action has yet been taken.

Wrong nomenclature?

The Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) being vigorously propagated in Himachal has become a topic of discussion among farm scientists who maintain that the nomenclature of the project is misleading. The project envisages that no chemical fertilisers or pesticides are used by the farmer but there are other expenses like cost of seeds, labour and other inputs and as such it should be called “low budget”. The government had also used the ZBNF in the budget and whether the name would be changed from “Zero budget to Low budget” would be known in next year’s budget, said a senior farm scientist, who was here recently to guide the farmers at the training camp organised by Agriculture University Palampur and the state agriculture department.

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