Monday 19 May 2014

The decision flow in government

Until now we saw how the legislature creates and passes bills or laws which represent what we people need, but you know that these ministers don't ‘do’ the work. We will now see how the work actually gets done and how the decisions stream down.

Chief minister or a prime minister as the head of government will assign different departments to different ministers, each of these departments is headed by a minister, E.g:  Urban development department would be headed by minister for urban development (surprise!). 

As you know ministers keep changing with each election and to ensure continuity each department is administratively headed by a secretary, these people are from administrative services background, it might either be IAS or state civil services like KAS for Karnataka. It is the secretary's responsibility to work with all necessary people in the department to get the actual policies implemented. He is also a guide and adviser to the minister providing the minister with  facts and figures to ensure that they can do their job effectively.  Just so that you are clear secretary is not a personal secretary! secretary is a secretary to the Government of India, a very very powerful position!. Secretary  is the administrative head of an array of permanent and powerful civil servants of that department who actually get the government machinery moving.

Heard of secretariat ?
It is the nerve center of the government. Literally it means the office of secretary, it assists government(ministers) in creation of government policies and coordinates with executive agencies for its execution.

Secretariat works at a policy level, below the secretariat are various organizations responsible for execution of these policies..

Below the level of secretariat you have what are known as ‘attached offices’ , on one end this is attached to the secretariat and on the other end it provides executive orders to lower level offices of that department to get the work done.

Below the level of ‘attached offices’ we have ‘subordinate offices’ , these are the field establishments responsible for actual execution of work.

Now that you have hopefully understood all three levels let me give you a shocker, what I said above is only illustrative ! some of the above structures could be missing or merged with others, it varies from department to department :-)

Lets put this theory to practice now, here is the organization chart of “Ministry of Labor”. Refer this link for full details like expansion of each abbreviation: 
http://labour.nic.in/content/organization-chart.php




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