NEW DELHI: Recalling his days as a bureaucrat with different government departments, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw explained how he made colleagues and juniors comfortable at work.
“Many times, I would clean machines with my own hands. It made the staff easy, comfortable and communicative with me. And the staff then saw a common man in me and excelled in their services,” he said in his pep talk to the railway engineer probationers at the National Academy of Indian Railways (NAIR) in Vadodara, Gujarat on Saturday.
He advised the probationers to follow the mantra of working like a common man with the officer’s responsibility.
“If you create a genuine respect for yourself among others by your work, by your conducts, by your day-to-day interaction with people, only then you will be called the most successful person in life with a genuine officer-like quality.”
Vaishnaw, a bureaucrat-turned-politician, asked the railway engineer probationers to take decisions keeping the larger interest of the nation and the needs of common people in mind.
He said the sincere people didn’t have competition as they kept working on the ground like common men with a higher degree of responsibility.
“Only four to five per cent of people are sincere. And there is no competition for sincere people. So be sincere and serving. Think and understand things outside the department as much as possible for excellence,” he said.
An alumnus of IIT-Kanpur, Vaishnaw had also studied at the Wharton School of Business of Pennsylvania. He served as a 1994-batch IAS officer of Odisha cadre before joining BJP.
He had also worked for a brief period in the PMO with the responsibility of creating a public-private partnership framework in infrastructure projects.
Thereafter, in 2006, he had taken a sabbatical and gone to study MBA. He is currently MP in Rajya Sabha representing Odisha.