Excelsior Correspondent
NEW DELHI, July 3: India has not progressed as much as it should have, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said today and asserted that boldness is required to drive change.
Addressing IAS officers of the 2015 batch here, he said countries that achieved independence after India, and faced greater resource constraints than India, have touched new heights of development.
He underlined that boldness is required to drive change.
He told the young civil servants to avoid getting into a mindset that resists change, and fill India’s administrative system with the energy of ‘New India’, a PMO statement said.
The Prime Minister said a fragmented administrative arrangement does not allow the collective capabilities of officers to deliver to the optimum level.
Dynamic change is needed to transform the system, he said.
He asked young officers to interact freely with senior-most officers of the Union Government over the next three months of their stint as Assistant Secretaries so that the system could benefit from the combination of their energy and fresh ideas, and the administrative experience of Secretary-level officers, the statement said.
The Prime Minister asked the young officers to recall their life up to the day of the UPSC result, the challenges they faced and use the opportunities they will now have, to bring about positive changes in the system, and the lives of the common people.
MoS for DoPT, Dr Jitendra Singh, while speaking on the occasion, referred to demographic change in the profile of IAS / Civil Services officers in the last few years. He said, in the last three years, he has started the new tradition of inviting the first 20 toppers over a cup of tea and one of the important inferences drawn from this experience is that hitherto less competitive States like Jammu & Kashmir, Haryana and Punjab, are now emerging more and more in the IAS / Civil Services list and also regularly figuring in the toppers’ list. Citing example, he said, a youth from J&K was second-ranker last year and this year again, a youth from J&K is 10th ranker. Similarly, a young female candidate from Haryana was first topper last year while a boy from Amritsar, Punjab is the second-ranker this year.
Dr Jitendra Singh also observed that, of late, more and more number of youth from average background were making it to the Civil Services list and many of them had done their schooling in Navodaya Vidyalaya and Kendriya Vidyalaya and other government schools, which has brought an end to the earlier impression that only the children from elite public schools could succeed in IAS exam. This new phenomenon, he said, augurs well because the youth with this background are much more closer to the ground reality of contemporary India and can identify with the enormous pro-poor schemes started by the Modi Government during the last three years and thus, implement them with greater commitment.
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