Group Consultation Archives - understand-culture

Groups of Ministers

Under the UPA government, many matters were referred to a Group of Ministers, a GoM, or to an Empowered Group of Ministers, an EGoM. When Pranab Mukherjee became President in 2012, he was heading 24 of the 39 EGoMs and GoMs, ThePrint reported.

On May 31, 2014, the new government of Narendra Modi abolished all nine EGoMs and 21 GoMs. Ministries were to “take appropriate decisions at the level of ministries and departments itself,” Business Standard reported.

In July 2016 the same paper wrote: “Two years into the Modi government, these panels are back.”

The Jointly Owned Pot

Saajhe ki handiyaan chauraahe par phootti hain. Jointly owned pots break at the crossroads. The Rekhta dictionary explains it in Hindi: a shared business does not succeed, and shared work always ends in quarrels.

Saajhe ki haandi, the jointly owned pot, is used on its own. Rekhta gives “a joint venture (which does not flourish).”

Diffused Accountability

In April 2009, the Second Administrative Reforms Commission summed up its findings in its Fifteenth Report. “The tendency to have large number of on-file consultations, often unnecessary, leads to diffused accountability,” it wrote. It also found “diffusion of responsibility and accountability among the large number of functionaries.”

It recommended: “The number of levels through which a file should pass for a decision should not exceed three.”

Until All Departments Concur

Rule 4 of the Government of India (Transaction of Business) Rules, 1961, deals with consultation between ministries: “When the subject of a case concerns more than one department, no decision be taken or order issued until all such departments have concurred, or, failing such concurrence, a decision thereon has been taken by or under the authority of the Cabinet.”

The Pigeons and the Net

In the Hitopadesha, a flock of pigeons is caught in a hunter’s net. The flock first abuses the pigeon whose advice led them into it. Then their king, Speckle-neck, tells them to act “at one moment and with one will, rising under the net, let us fly off with it.”

“Having pondered this advice, the Pigeons adopted it; and flew away with the net.” This is Edwin Arnold’s translation.

The Kamaraj Consensus

Jawaharlal Nehru died on May 27, 1964. The Congress had to choose a new prime minister. The party president, K. Kamaraj, consulted the Congress members of Parliament and the chief ministers, and then announced the choice, Lal Bahadur Shastri.

Morarji Desai had wanted the post and opposed the method. He accepted the outcome. Shastri was sworn in on June 9, 1964. The Asian Age later wrote that Kamaraj “evolved a novel concept of consensus.”

God Speaks Through the Five

In Premchand’s story Panch Parmeshwar (1916), the friends Jumman and Algu each sit in judgment in a case that touches the other. Algu, as head of the village panchayat, rules against his friend. An old woman has told him: Panch ke dil mein khuda basta hai. God lives in the heart of the panch.

Later Jumman, now an enemy, must judge Algu’s case. When he judges fairly, the village cries out: Panch Parmeshwar ki jai! Victory to the panch who is God.