LUCKNOW: To ensure corruption-free governance, the newly-appointed ministers of Yogi government 2.0 have not been given the option to choose the personal staff of their choice. Instead, a new lottery system has been introduced with the approval of the CM's office.
The system has been digitized and the ministers concerned are made to choose their staff from a list of employees randomly through a computer lottery supervised by the secretariat administration department. The system was followed by a number of ministers who assumed office on Tuesday.
Significantly, CM Yogi Adityanath has kept the department of administrative reforms with himself.
All members of the support staff who had worked with ministers in their previous five-year stint have been retained in the new list.
Meanwhile, the participation of women in governance and general administrative work has been raised to 20%. They will be deputed as private secretaries (PS), assistant PS, review officers (RO), and assistant ROs of the newly-appointed ministers.
Sources said in the final list of personal staff approved by the CMO, the names of the personnel were kept confidential and were replaced by a code to keep the selection free from caste, creed, religion or regional considerations. Hence, while choosing the staff, the ministers will not be aware of whom they will select as their staff.
The entire system of the personal staff selection was framed under the supervision of principal secretary, secretariat administration, Amrit Abhijat who claimed the CM had stressed on digitized allocation of staff to improve the functioning of the system.
However, while the majority of ministers welcomed the new system developed for allocation of personal staff, some of them had reservations over working with women principal secretaries owing to late-night working hours or even travel regimens which the women staff may find difficult to follow.