Dilip is considered India's foremost Image Management guru and resident iconoclast. He wavers between irrational exuberance and cataclysmic gloom but can be influenced at mail@dilipcherian.com
It is often considered that the most important babu in Delhi is not the chief secretary but the police commissioner. High profile incumbents of this chair have graced Parliament and become governors in states. Getting to be commissioner of police is very often a long process. Most of it, DKB knows, is conducted in stealth […]
Sensing the current popular mood against the UP government due to the Covid crisis, the party and the Modi sarkar are keen to ensure the party’s success in the upcoming assembly elections. A lot of that worry has to do with the perceptions about Yogi running the government with handpicked but clearly inadequate babu support. […]
No one’s willing to bell this cat! The dramatis personae are still largely the same, but a stealthy U-turn was in the works, say those in the know, at Sanchar Bhavan. The question that isn’t being asked yet is whether the government acted in haste when in 2019 it chose to give VRS to thousands […]
Senior about-to-retire babus of two BJP-ruled states are a miffed lot withthe appointment of former Uttar Pradesh chief secretary Anup Chandra Pandey as the new Election Commissioner of India having been done and dusted in a surprise move. But it was clearly in the works in Delhi, long before the skirmishes between UP Chief Minister […]
The instances of bureaucrats getting caught in the middle of political battles is a growing and dynamic list. Those in the know say that after the Centre recently amended the empanelment policy for IAS officers, young officers fear that their careers will be jeopardized if there is no political consensus between the Centre and the […]
In the context of the second Covid surge, a group of 116 former civil servants has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi accusing the government of not addressing the crucial issues at stake. What makes this “open letter” significant is that the signatories include former Cabinet Secretary K.M. Chandrasekhar, former foreign secretary and National Security […]
Protocol, anyone? Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pep talk to district magistrates on the Covid-19 issue in an online meeting has got some raising the issue of whether it was right for Modi to interact directly with district magistrates and other officials while bypassing their respective ministers. Moreover, the event was telecast live just a few […]
The devastating Covid crisis has renewed demand for the creation of an Indian Medical Service along the lines of the all-India services such as IAS and IPS etc., at the earliest. The second wave of the epidemic has caught India’s creaking health infrastructure on the wrong foot again. It has blown the lid off the […]
Is India’s fabled ‘steel frame’ only creaking or is it screaming? The coronavirus pandemic surge has devastated big cities including the capital and brought the healthcare system to its knees. India has now been recording the highest number of new coronavirus cases in the world and the death toll is mounting. The second wave of […]
While the administration has been widely rebuked for complacency in the face of the coronavirus epidemic, a district magistrate in Tripura is in trouble for being overly enthusiastic in enforcing night curfew rules during a marriage in the state capital Agartala. A video that recorded the incident went viral on social media and political parties […]
