With a few officials at the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) becoming the latest set of COVID-19 patients among government staff, the question of whether the concept of work from home (WFH) could be tried out in an aggressive manner has become a subject of debate.
On Wednesday, a senior member of the CMO, who had earlier tested positive for COVID-19, died at a government hospital.
According to one school of thought among the officials, since there are options like e-filing and videoconferencing, there is no need for every senior officer working at the Secretariat to come to Fort St. George — the seat of power —every day. With a handful of reliable officers who could be put on rotation, the situation can be managed, even as the conventional system of the approval process is adhered to.
The compelling reason for floating this suggestion is the need for maintaining physical distance.
S. Peter Anthonysamy, president, Tamil Nadu Secretariat Association (Tansa), said there was “enormous fear” among the employees in general, as the virus had affected the entire range of staff, from IAS officers to middle-level officials and drivers.
Pointing out that even now, only a third of the staff are required to report for work on a given day, another group of officials said that videoconferencing was fast becoming a “well-established practice” within the government system.
Most of the instructions were passed on through WhatsApp and phone, they said. However, the kind of issues that are cropping up before policymakers is such that the idea of putting officers on rotation to handle matters will not work. Also, unlike in the private sector, where seamless migration to WFH is possible, the traditional style of functioning, at times, becomes inevitable in the government set-up, a senior official noted. For example, not every officer could be entrusted with the task of drafting press releases at this point in time, as the political executive’s advice had to be translated into words properly, the official added.
Supporting this view, a secretary-level officer in the Union government, who is from the Tamil Nadu cadre, said, “It can’t be 100% virtual because of the way government is structured,” despite the fact that at the Centre, most of the ministries were on e-office, and electronic file disposal was possible from home. “You may have to dig out old files, for which you will have to come to office,” the officer observed.
But, M.G. Devasahayam, a Nagercoil-based former IAS officer of the Haryana cadre, said that given the level of digitisation in the State, and with certain amount of fine-tuning of the system, e-filing or any new method of governance can be adopted in a big way.
