Welcome Sudhansh Pant!

Jaipur: Top IAS officer Sudhansh Pant, a nominee of the Centre, will take charge of the administration of the State as the new Chief Secretary. Pant is to join the office today, as the DoP released the order on Sunday in this regard. He will also handle the additional charge of Rajasthan Mines and Minerals Corporation, Udaipur.

The entire bureaucracy is happy with the arrival of a bureaucrat with extraordinary talent and experience in governance, who is a good administrator, with a clean image and an excellent personality. After the arrival of the new government and the new CM, the way the administration had faltered for the last three weeks, the period of confusion and uncertainty will now end. The rule of the government will now be restored.

The public is now confident that with the mandate and authority with which Pant has come from the Centre, the administration will now run totally as per the system without any pressure or compulsion. Anyway, Sudhansh is a stickler for rules and regulations and a follower of the rule book. Under his leadership, bureaucrats will now be able to work impartially, fearlessly and with complete transparency.

In fact, during the last 5 years of Congress rule, the condition of bureaucracy in the State had deteriorated. The people of the ruling party treated every small and big bureaucrat as a paid servant.

Therefore, with full authority and power from the Centre, to run the administration, the bureaucrats are looking at Pant as their godfather. Now, the challenge before Pant is to work strictly and quickly as per the expectations of the bureaucrats and emerge as their “strong leader”.

First of all, he will have to release the much-awaited transfer lists of IAS, IPS, IFS and RAS officers. This is a marathon task and despite the political commitments of the CM, the lists will have to be approved soon. New heads will have to be found for many big and small departments in the secretariat. The most important is the search for a suitable and capable head of the Finance Department.

In the previous governments, the role of CS in transfer posting matters had become zero. Due to this, in a way the authority of the CS office had diminished. Pant will have to restore that authority and morale and only then the CS will be able to maintain the hold on the entire administration.

This task is not difficult for Pant because Delhi has sent him to Jaipur with full authority for this very purpose. Pant is a 1991 batch IAS officer and has been working in the Modi Government for a long time. He knows and understands how the government runs there. The responsibility of running the same kind of organised and systemic government in Rajasthan also lies on the strong shoulders of Pant. The general public also wants efficient administration in the new government.