Cabinet approves Mission Karmayogi to upgrade skills of civil servants

The Union Cabinet has approved a programme for civil servants to improve their skills, in what the Centre has said is the biggest human resources development reform in the government.

Mission Karmayogi is intended to upgrade the training process of officers and employees at various levels — from section officers to secretaries — after they are recruited, the government said. The programme, called National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building officially, aims at capacity building and will help civil servants improve their performance and be future-ready, it said.

“This is the biggest human resources development reform in the government,” Union minister for Information and Broadcasting Prakash Javadekar said while addressing the media to announce a slew of Cabinet’s decisions.

The nationwide programme will also help civil servants stay abreast of the best practices across the world, Javadekar said.

The programme will impart skills that will help civil servants ensure ease of living life and ease of doing business in the country, the minister said.

“Mission Karmayogi aims to prepare Indian Civil Servants for the future by making them more creative, constructive, imaginative, innovative, proactive, professional, progressive, energetic, enabling, transparent and technology-enabled,” C Chandramouli, secretary, Department of Personnel and Training, said.

A council headed by the prime minister will decided on the programmes for capacity building.The council will have chief ministers, Union ministers, civil service officials and experts.

Union Minister Jitendra Singh the government is also planning a capacity building department that will involve experts and global professionals. He said the mission will lay greater importance on the role of a civil servant than the rules they will have to follow.

The minister said the scheme will have two paths. In the self-driven path, officials will be able to choose their fields of interest, while in the guided path, officials will “be provided with the wherewithal to perform their jobs effectively”.

The programme will lay emphasis on ‘on-site learning’ and complement “off-site learning”. It will promote e-learning, he said.

The Cabinet meeting was held on Wednesday (September 2) afternoon and was chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Javadekar said the meeting also approved three memorandums of understanding — between textile ministry and Japan for quality evaluation, between mining ministry and Finland, and between renewable energy ministry and Denmark.

The Cabinet also approved bill making Kashmiri, Dogri and Hindi also as official languages, besides Urdu and English, in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir. The Jammu and Kashmir Official Languages Bill, 2020 will be introduced in the monsoon session of Parliament, Javadekar said.