Rajasthan has topped the list of States and Union Territories (UTs) followed by Andhra Pradesh and Bihar in the Modi government’s effort to register civil servants for making them future-ready and citizen centric when India turns 100 at 2047, revealed an update the Centre made earlier this month on the Mission Karmayogi.

Interestingly, the government is offering; “yoga break at workplace”, “stress management”, “understanding motivation” and “lifestyle for environment” as some of the key behavioural courses to officials in States and UTs through a 100 per cent government-owned online learning platform, “iGOT Karmayogi”.

This is to make working environment healthy and encouraging, akin to that in private set-up, for getting maximum output from the civil servants at various levels of decision making at the Centre, States and urban bodies.

Likewise, ‘functional courses’ have been designed to educate babus about code of conduct for government employees, prevention of sexual harassment of women at workplace, stay safe in cyber space, Microsoft word and Microsoft excel, both for beginners.

And, there are also ‘domain courses’ like introduction to emerging technologies, overview of Viksit Bharat 2047, and on the three new criminal laws.

Of the 36 States and UTs, Rajasthan has 9,08,326 government official users for undertaking reorientation programmes, while Andhra Pradesh accounted for 8,42,778, and Bihar 6,18,055.

Other big States have fared poor. For instance, a large State like Uttar Pradesh has only 1,22,925 users, Gujarat 69,058, Telangana 47,201, Madhya Pradesh 33,800, Delhi 12,322, Maharashtra 9,247, Punjab 5,333, Karnataka 843, and Kerala 659.

Tamil Nadu with 236 government official users figures among the bottom six States and UTs. Others are; Sikkim 229 users, Himachal Pradesh 198, West Bengal 176 and Lakshadweep 15 which is the last.

A senior IAS officer of the Maharashtra cadre told businessline that, though the attempt is fine since the bureaucracy needs to be fine tuned to keep pace with fast changing world and people’s need but admitted its difficult to get babus registered for the reorientation programmes. Perhaps, the Centre will have to come up with more a interesting way of drawing civil servants to new ways of thinking and working.

The target is train over 2.52 crore civil servants from Centre, States and urban bodies to give up their babu mindset and transform their capacity building under Mission Karmayogi. There are over 30 lakh civil servants in the centre, 2.2 crore in States and 50 lakh in urban local bodies, panchayat raj institutions.

The government officials among others are being equipped with basic courses to make them friendly with technology and other governance models. They include, digital safety, data driven decision making, cyber security basics, the three new criminal laws, Microsoft excel for beginners and basics of administrative law.

Besides the human resource, the Centre is also working to improve over 790 government training institutions so that they are empowered to increase government-citizen interaction enabling ease of living and ease of business.

The government has prepared capacity building plans for 100 Central organisations and created National Standards for Civil Service Training Institutions, with 160 more organisations have been accredited.

The government in April 2021 had appointed the three-member Capacity Building Commission as an independent body with full executive power to standardise harmonisation across public sector learning and development landscape.