NEW DELHI: “Saheb meeting mein hain” is perhaps the most familiar refrain in the corridors of India’s bureaucracy. Walk into a government office, call a secretariat or try reaching a senior official, and chances are the response will be the same—the officer is in a meeting.
For generations, the government has measured activity not merely by files moved or decisions taken but also by meetings held. Some resolve problems; many merely consume time. Now, all this may end soon with the cabinet secretary’s note asking babus to “avoid long meetings” and finish them in 30 to 60 minutes.
The country’s top bureaucrat has made a welcome intervention. In a recent communication to all chief secretaries and directors general of Administrative Training Institutes, Dr T.V. Somanathan, cabinet secretary in the Union government, has circulated a ‘Guide on Conducting Effective Meetings’.
The message has already reached Bihar. After chief secretary Pratyaya Amrit went through the document, the state’s general administration department last week circulated it among all IAS and Bihar Administrative Service (BAS) officers, signalling that the recommendations are expected to percolate through the state’s administrative machinery.
Beneath its administrative veneer of the detailed communication lies something considerably more ambitious—a management philosophy aimed at reshaping the everyday habits of civil servants. The guidance also finds an interesting resonance in Bihar’s own administrative style. Chief minister Samrat Choudhary is known for quick meetings that usually conclude within about 45 minutes. His predecessor, Nitish Kumar, by contrast, often presided over marathon review sessions that stretched for hours.
Somanathan’s document leaves little doubt about the expectations. Meetings, it argues, should be tightly structured and time-bound. A typical meeting, it suggests, should be planned for 20 or 50 minutes, allowing enough buffer for an unexpected discussion while still concluding within the conventional 30- or 60-minute slot. Excessively long meetings, it says, should be an exception. Equally importantly, no single agenda item—or participant—should be allowed to dominate proceedings or hijack the discussion.
Somanathan’s explanation for choosing meetings as the subject of the first in a proposed series of behavioural guides is disarmingly simple: meetings consume an inordinate part of a civil servant’s working day. Worse, officers themselves have told him that many begin late, become overstretched and directionless, and often end without any “tangible takeaways”. Somanathan’s objective, however, extends far beyond shortening meetings. The guide is, in effect, an attempt to change the culture of governance itself.
The guide throws open a deceptively simple question: Is the meeting necessary at all? If the objective can be achieved through an email, a telephone call or a one-to-one conversation, the meeting should not be convened in the first place. If participants have not received the relevant background papers or have had no time to prepare, the meeting should be deferred. A meeting without a clearly defined purpose, the cabinet secretary suggests, is a meeting that probably should not happen.
