Union Minister of State for Personnel Jitendra Singh on Monday said institutions like Indian Institute of Public Administration (IIPA) should work in sync with Karmayogi programme of the Central Government to train personnel for tackling new challenges of governance, especially to young civil servants of not only Centre but States and Union Territories as well.

Addressing the 325th Executive Council meeting of Indian Institute of Public Administration (IIPA) here, he also mentioned that Assistant Secretaries on Delhi stint must be exposed to modern governance tools in IIPA for their better understanding. This will make them more aware of bureaucrats, he added.

Envisaged in 2020, the flagship Mission Karmayogi has been carefully designed to lay the foundations for capacity building for civil servants so that they remain entrenched in Indian culture and sensibilities and remain connected, with their roots, while they learn from the best institutions and practices across the world. The programme is being delivered by setting up an Integrated Government Online Training-iGOTKarmayogi Platform.

Capacity of Civil Services plays a vital role in rendering a wide variety of services, implementing welfare programmes and performing core governance functions. A transformational change in Civil Service Capacity is proposed to be affected by organically linking the transformation of work culture, strengthening public institutions and adopting modern technology to build civil service capacity with the overall aim of ensuring efficient delivery of services to citizens.

Speaking about injecting young blood in IIPA, the Minister said, “We took a decision of opening up the membership because otherwise it was getting reduced to the retired officers’ club and the results have been very rewarding. In the last two years ,we have had the youngest members among the assistant secretaries who just passed out of Mussoorie”. Singh even suggested IIPA should think about having a membership drive because many of the prospective members have not acquired membership because they’re not aware of it.

The Minister said, “Every year what we are doing is that we have a batch of assistance secretaries before they go to their respective cadres, we request them or suggest to them to acquire the membership otherwise in the normal course most of them are not aware of it but once they are told they’re very happy doing it.” He also informed about his initiative to make IIPA an integrated board, which is much more integrated than a few years ago amalgamating institutions like Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, DoPT.