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To grapple with change... It is back to school with a difference for AP bureaucrats

V. Rishi Kumar

HYDERABAD, July 2

IT is back to school with a difference for a select group of top bureaucrats. They are now engaged in a new paradigm of training designed by the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University in league with Dr M.C.R. Institute of Human Resource Development.

Grappling with change is the new mantra. To handle sensitive issues such as administrative reforms, restructure of public sector enterprises, and coping with heavy infrastructure and multi-layered administrative structure is the challenge these change-ag ents are being trained to handle.

This training comes in at a time when the Andhra Pradesh Government is set to embark on to the second generation reform process. Saddled with scores of problems including the issue of handling the task of fixed mindset, they are taken through a challengi ng case-methodology approach by a core team of Harvard experts lead by the Associate Dean of JFK Institute, Boston, Prof Peter Zimmerman.

Why is this model interesting? The State Government has 12.5 lakh personnel working for it backed by an administrative structure having 47 levels/layers of hierarchical structure. For a bureaucrat heading a department or an organisation, it is this aspec t which makes this task of expediting decision-making a daunting task.

In an era where speed is the essence of decision-making process, this kind of administrative structure provides a thorny problem for administrators. In order to address these issues, the Dr M.C.R. Institute, which had entered into a memorandum of underst anding with the JFK School, Boston, has designed a Executive Programme for a select batch of 60 bureaucrats.

These `students' will have one set of crash course at the Hyderabad centre which is to be followed by a two-week module at Harvard. This will then be followed by yet another crash course at Hyderabad.

This model of taking administrators back to school stems from the Chief Minister, Mr N. Chandrababu Naidu's resolve to adopt best practices to make Vision 2020, drafted by consultants McKinsey & Co, a reality.

With the Government embarking upon a range of non-conventional administrative changes to bring in efficiency by marshalling the available scarce resources, this model of training the leaders is now a challenge for the Government. This is the first such i n a series of measures that Mr Naidu expects will help tackle the problem of bringing in modern and best practices into administrative set up.

All public functionaries have been categorised to ensure that the appropriate training content and methodologies are developed for catering to their specific HRD requirements.