New Delhi
10 May 2007
New Delhi says that for every Indian diplomat, there are four
Brazilian and seven Chinese diplomats. It has accordingly decided to hit the reform road
to keep pace with "India's expanding role in global affairs".
"We have a decision in principle by the government at the highest level that we will
increase the size of our cadre," Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon told the
parliamentary standing committee on external affairs.
"What we are talking about now of the ministry as a whole, what we are now examining
is more than doubling the size over the next five years. It will have to be phased and
organised, and we will include more than just increasing the size of the foreign service.
It would also mean looking at how we can organise our work slightly differently, use the
capacities that exist outside in society very simply," he said.
The Ministry of External Affairs also proposes to outsource "peripheral" jobs. Mr Menon
told the committee headed by Dr Laxminarayan Pandey, "When the ministry was set up,
protocol had to do everything that the hospitality industry in India now can do. Now these
are the jobs that we can actually get done and we can concentrate on our primary
functions."
He said that the work of the ministry has increased manifold in the last decade but the
number of personnel has reduced. India's foreign trade has grown seven times in the
last 10 years, passports issued have doubled to 44 lakhs last year, visas granted have
tripled to over 57 lakhs and the visits by heads of states and governments and official
visits by foreign ministers have increased by about 165 per cent.
"To cope with this increased work load and apart from our increased political work load,
our budget has tripled in these 10 years but the number of personnel has actually
shrunk. We have gone down from 4,866 to 4,746 (of which the size of the officers
belonging to the Indian Foreign Service is less than 700.) I must speak frankly that the
strain is telling on us ...," he told the MPs.
Mr Menon went on to state that the Ministry of Finance recently sanctioned 220 more
posts for consular and visa wings of the Indian missions in the Gulf.
The committee suggested that "action [be] taken to ensure that the projected level of
personnel is in place at the earliest". It asked the ministry to expeditously assess
additional manpower requirements over the next five years including the proposed
outsourcing of certain peripheral jobs.
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