Testing times

Additional secretaries and joint secretaries are happy that they will not accompany senior bureaucrats who have been called to make presentations to Prime Minister Narendra Modi this week. They say it will be a good way to test the calibre of their bosses. But they think Modi should have summoned the secretaries without advance notice. "The secretaries just pick up the phone and ask us to brief them on some issue immediately and that too in brief. We don't get any time to prepare. The same thing should happen to them as well - that would be the real test of their competence," says one official.