Pranab fumes over 'lousy' notes to Cabinet

Stressing that the Cabinet notes meant for Group of Ministers should be in line with the procedures, a Cabinet secretariat circular cites Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee pointing out mistakes galore in the notes submitted to him for one of many GoM meetings he chairs.

Mukherjee is so upset with the lousy drafting of notes submitted by the top bureaucrats in the government for consideration by the Cabinet or the GoM that he got a circular issued that "notes should be of a high quality and procedurally compliant."

It adds: "In some cases, it is seen that the notes forwarded by the ministries/departments are often rushed one or two days prior to the scheduled meeting, which hardly leaves any time for scrutiny."

This is one of half a dozen such circulars issued only this year, including one in which the bureaucrats were pulled up for padding up notes with unnecessary jargon that confuses more than throwing more light on the issues under discussion.

Yet another circular wanted the bureaucrats to give full form of acronyms and abbreviations in the first reference and better avoid those not common. 

Once a political science lecturer in a South 24-Paranas college in West Bengal, Mukherjee is quite strict in use of words by anyone in the government. That was the theme of the lecture he gave to the newly-elected Congress MLAs in Kolkata in July.

Mukherjee is not the first to frown at the notes not passing the muster as only a few months ago Prime Minister Manmohan Singh too expressed unhappiness over the poor quality of English and grammatical mistakes in notes sent to the Cabinet.