The Union Cabinet met under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday and approved the Karmayogi scheme. The scheme will work on improving the work of government officials.
This is the biggest plan so far to increase the skill of government officials. According to Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar, under the Karmayogi scheme, civil service officials will be made to focus on new technology and use e-learning to their full potential. Under the scheme, development will be done in the order of individual to institutional. This post-recruitment scheme will help in increasing the skill sets of employees and increase the efficiency of civil servants working for the government.
The scheme, which is being officially called the “National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building”, plans to transform human resource management in the country and aims to form a “rolesbased” system instead of “rule-based” practices. This scheme also introduces the necessity for civil servants to be constantly updated. Earlier, employees were not required to undergo any additional training, but now, the government will set up a separate commission for this scheme. A Capacity Building Commission will be built to harmonise training standards and it will supervise all training institutions in the country. The Chairman of the AR Council will be the Prime Minister. Experts from different disciplines will provide training and there will be continuous assessment to judge the capacities of employees. There will be a grading system employed for this lifelong training program and a certificate will be given at every level. “The scale is so huge that it could probably emerge as the largest civil service reform in the world in terms of spread and in terms of the depth…and what is the ultimate purpose of all this… it is basically to equip the civil servant, with domain and functional competencies, which would be goal driven, and also build behavioural competencies,” said C. Chandramouli, Secretary of the Department of Personnel and Training.
Union Minister Dr Jitendra Singh said that the Karmayogi scheme will be available for all employees and senior officers will not be able to take advantage of it. The Prime Minister will be the head of the scheme, Chief Ministers will head the states and some Union ministers will also be included in it. There will be a fee of Rs 432 for Karmayogi training, which will be borne by the government.
Sharing more information about the scheme, the Secretary of DOPT said that for this an HR Council will be formed under the Prime Minister that will decide on the appointments under this whole mission. A large-scale online platform will also be created.
“This scheme is based on the government’s vision on how a civil servant should be. A civil servant of today, in order to meet the challenges of the world, will have to be imaginative and innovative, proactive and polite, professional and progressive, energetic and enabling, transparent and tech enabled, and constructive and creative,” added Chandramouli.