Menon makes a case for increase in staff strength

The tendency of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) to surrender posts has led India to a pass, where while having pretensions to becoming a global power, India barely has enough officers in its foreign service to cover even strategically crucial foreign missions adequately.

Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon told a Parliamentary panel last week that the Ministry's strength at present was 4,746. This number has actually been declining over the years because of a government directive that 'inactive' posts must be surrendered.

Every year, the MEA appoints 660 officers but this number cannot keep up with government-induced attrition and the need to consolidate India's growing assertiveness in the world.

The ministry has also had to yield to pressure and has had to appoint academics, out of work politicians and non-career bureaucrats in key missions, with sometimes disastrous consequences.

The Ambassadorial appointment in Croatia of a functionary from the Foreign Affairs Cell of the Congress party led to a serious diplomatic embarrassment for India two years ago because the appointee had to be withdrawn on charges of misconduct.

Mohammad Afzal, Congress leader, former journalist and Rajya Sabha MP was appointed India's ambassador to Angola in 2005. Angola is of crucial importance to India because after Nigeria, it is the second largest petroleum producing country in Africa but India has to make do with a single diplomat, while China has an embassy.

As ambassador to Angola, Afzal, who was appointed to the post by former Foreign Minister K Natwar Singh, is accredited to six other neighbouring African nations.

By contrast, China, realising the importance of this cluster of oil-rich African states, has a full-fledged embassy in all these countries.

The Foreign Secretary merely underscored this point when he told the Parliamentary Standing Committee that for every Indian diplomat, there were four Brazilian and seven Chinese diplomats. He also said that in the last 10 years, the strength of the ministry had come down from 4,866 to 4,746.

Visits by heads of State in the last 10 years had increased by about 165 per cent.

"India has joined 13 new multilateral organization or groupings in this period. To cope with this increased workload ... our budget has tripled in these 10 years. But the number of personnel has actually shrunk... I must speak frankly that the strain is telling on us," Menon said.

He said that though the finance ministry had sanctioned 220 additional posts for the consular and visa wings of missions, especially those in the Persian Gulf, the MEA's work needed to be reorganized.

He said that proposals to double the intake of officers for the foreign service over the next five years was being considered.