DailyPost 2485
LEGALLY MANDATED RESPONSE
When you job provides you the luxury to decide on the way to act, respond, decide your responsibility and accountability, if any, it would become the fascinating job in the world. You can also decide your reporting authority, reviewing authority and also the accepting authority of your performance, then it makes the job even more fairy tale. These three converge into one authority, and unfortunately, they are deciding on the performance of someone; individual, cumulative or party. The performance appraisal process is just casting of one vote, and person / political executive / party in question would take it as a stamp on their outstanding performance.
The person who supposedly evaluates is always at the receiving end. It also works in a pre-paid manner. Once you vote and for the person and party wins, you give a carte blanche for the next five years. What a de-facto way to judge someone’s performance? The group of people we are talking about are the political executive of the country? Think of situation if a state finance minister performance was annually reviewed by the Chief Minister / Union Finance Minister and the CMs done by the PM in the well prescribed and accepted performance appraisal format. Action that would entail on the grading could be pre-decided. While that would be like asking for the moon, when none from the political executive can even vaguely think of it.
At least it can start with a legally mandated responses as per the law of the land. Prior to that the deliverables have to decided, the ones that have to personally delivered. The responses which cannot be legally denied has to be of things critical in nature, its lack of delivery would lead to mess, mis-governance, wrong delivery or no delivery, accentuation of the crisis, or leading to damage that could broadly not be undone. The core thought that comes out of it, is that the political executive should not be able to run away from his responsibility. Response means commitment and it can be by way action, oral or written communication and preferably the combination of the three, depending on the situation / issue.
Today any crisis or an issue means the general disappearance of the political executive. At best, a political slugfest. People don’t know where to go and who to get response from. The ever-bubbling personas get into eerie silence. Even if they visit or act, nobody knows what they have done. More often than not they themselves don’t know what they have done. Multiplicities of agencies in cooperative federalism make a mockery of the basic scheme of governance. Behind the scenes there are voices and noises, whispers, eavesdropping and mouth to ear conversations, but no official, neat, documented response. The response which is accountable. The masses currently keep groping in the dark on every issue /crisis.
WITHOUT LEGALLY MANDATED RESPONSES, WE HAVE USHERED IN A SHAM OF RESPONSIVE GOVERNANCE.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.