This refers to A K Bhattacharya's column "All the PM's men" (Raisina Hill, April 7). The executive is made up of two arms - the political and the bureaucracy. The political executive represents the people in a democracy and hence the formulation and laying down of government policies should be its primary task. The bureaucracy is the permanent executive and its primary task should be implementation of the government policies. It should also help the political executive formulate the policies but the final decision should be that of the political executive, as it indeed is. The bureaucracy should have full independence and accountability in implementing government policies and programmes, without any meddling by the political executive. If such a clear-cut distribution of responsibility and accountability is in place, it will follow that the posting of bureaucrats should be left to the bureaucracy, say, through a placement board, which will handle this task in a way that yields best results.
Kishor Kulkarni Mumbai
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