In the 1980s, thermal power plants in India were facing a unique problem: Coal rakes were not reaching in time, leading to slippages in targets and low plant load factors. There was nobody senior enough to crack the whip, cut through the blame game and get the job done. Irritated that such a small issue was creating bottlenecks, the government created a post in the Cabinet Secretariat: Secretary (coordination), who would be number-two to the cabinet secretary and, besides acting as a fifth wheel and doing jobs that the cabinet secretary might not have the time (or inclination) for, coordinate.
A couple of years later, when the Supreme Court observed it was tired of hearing cases where two arms of the government were fighting each other in court and sought to know why the government couldn’t just sort out its problems internally, the job of arbitrating in inter-ministry disputes was also passed on to the secretary (coordination).
This is the work Ajit Kumar Seth had been doing for three years. He did not have to go through a ring of fire to prove himself. He was the senior-most in the 1974 batch. So he was set to get the top job — that of the cabinet secretary.
In many ways, this is a copybook appointment. The government had one or two other people in mind but they were either not available or “not ready to come”. Among these may have been Pulok Chatterjee, secretary to Sonia Gandhi for long and currently posted in the World Bank. If a gubernatorial reshuffle creates a vacancy in the Prime Minister’s Office, that is the vacancy he would like to occupy, a strategic role of acting as a communication channel between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi.
Meanwhile, Seth is likely to be pitchforked into the hurly burly of crisis management from food prices to natural disasters. As he has not been back in Uttar Pradesh, his parent cadre, for several years, it may take him time to adjust.
From all accounts, Seth was rated an efficient, low-profile and self-effacing officer in his early years. He had been District Magistrate in Mainpuri and Lucknow and Divisional Commissioner in Kumaon, and, apparently, did such a good job that he was recommended to become the first secretary in the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations in Geneva, in the early 1980s. In this job, he enjoyed the support of the then top UP bureaucrat, TSR Subramanian.
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He returned to India and after stints at the ministries of textiles and commerce – where coincidentally Subramanian was the secretary – he found himself out of favour, with one or two ‘lukewarm’ annual confidential reports. He didn’t make it to the rank of additional secretary and opted to stay in Delhi during the late 1990s – spending six years as the resident commissioner, UP. It alsmost seemed his drive and ambition had left him in so far as his career was concerned. From 1996 to 1998, TSR Subramanian was the cabinet secretary. Seth spent the years as the joint secretary in the textiles ministry.
He is said to have stayed a gracious, gentlemanly and a good-natured person throughout, even through disappointments. He has a daughter who is married and lives abroad. Both his parents and his wife’s live with them in Delhi. That constitutes a pressure of another kind and might have been the reason for putting his career on the back burner, if a reason must be given.
To be sure, Seth has had an impressive record of running a state in the early years of his career. But the last few years have been fairly relaxed and spent in Delhi. At a time when the Central agenda has to be driven through states, is he the ideal person to steer the course? Hard to say. But the 1975 batch of the IAS has lost the chance to get a stab at the top job. And we’re back to the ‘senior-most’ principle.