With the purpose of improving efficiency and transparency in governance, Prime Minister, Narendra Modi has divided 77 Ministers into 8 different groups to develop technology-based resources and to recruit a pool of professionals into their teams. Government is planning to bring in young professionals, make the best-use of technology for monitoring different projects and seek suggestions from retiring officials, for better governance. Each group comprises of 9-10 ministers and a union minister as group coordinator. Hardeep Singh Puri, Narendra Singh Tomar, Piyush Goyal, Dharmendra Pradhan, Smriti Irani and Anurag Thakur have been assigned the role of group coordinators. There are several tasks that have been assigned to ministers like developing a portal in each minister’s office for updates on the performance of the government’s flagship schemes and policies, creation of a dashboard for monitoring decisions made by the respective ministers and also for creating a system to schedule meetings and managing correspondence. This has been done with the aim to streamline the government functioning and speed up the work so that there are minimum complaints.
The initiative of dividing the ministers into eight groups has been taken forward after ‘Chintan Shivirs’ (brainstorming sessions) of the entire council of ministers, chaired by PM Modi. A total of 5 ‘chintan shivirs’ got held, each lasting for about 5 hours in duration. Personal Efficiency, Focused Implementation, Ministry Functioning & Stakeholder Engagement, Party Coordination & Effective Communication and Parliamentary practices. were the different agendas of these 5 brainstorming sessions. The last session which was ‘Parliamentary Practices’ was also attended by Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla and Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu.