NEW DELHI: The Indian bureaucracy is now working overtime to destroy and “weed out” one of its own sinews – moth-eaten and irrelevant files. In a span of three weeks this month, the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG) got rid of files, which, in real estate terms, would occupy 37.19 lakh sqft or 84.94 acres. Now, that is more than twice the area on which rests Taj Mahal.
“Come to think of it, the Rashtrapati Bhavan building is spread over just 400,000 sqft or 9.18 acres,” said DARPG Secretary V Srinivas, adding the government is on mission mode to “weed out” thousands of files, which would otherwise occupy as much as 50 lakh sqft of space, in the next few weeks.
The elimination of old files that have long outlived their original purpose was part of DARPG’s Special Campaign 2.0 being implemented across 75 central government ministries and departments in “remote outstation offices, foreign missions and posts, attached and subordinate offices”.
Speaking to this newspaper, Srinivas, however, said that care was taken to preserve valuable colonial era files and reports that dealt with public administration, secretariat reorganisation, staffing of government offices, retirement of European officers and remedial measures undertaken to cover for the loss of personnel as a consequence of Partition.
“Some of these reports date back to 1908, 1919, 1927 and right up to Partition,” Srinivas said, adding, “There are gems in which Indian clerks complained against Indian Civil Service (ICS) officers.”
These, DARPG Minister Jitendra Singh said, “have been sent to the national archives because of legacy reasons”. The campaign began in 2014 when government office corridors were parking spaces for junk, Singh added.