Japan’s power corridor getting jammed by retired bureaucrats

WHAT do you do when aging populace are more than willing to work for more number of years to sustain their quality of life? It may not be felt so much in India, one of the global hubs of young people, but it has already been a huge debate in Japan, at least in government circle.
Some 1,528 senior officers at government-linked organizations are being occupied by a former government official for at least the third successive time from the same ministry or agency, Kyodo News reported quoting a survey of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

In fact, as high as 4,916 officials who are working at such government-affiliated organizations are aged 65 or more. The statistics are interesting in the backdrop of the government’s intention to ban in principle the hiring of retired civil servants as senior officials of government-affiliated departments so that recruitment can be open to the public.

Here is one of the interesting comments by one of the readers of the original Kyodo News: “I was reading an excellent article the other day about how lobbyist in the US--a huge chunk of whom are former Senate and House members, boosted by former government agency workers--have managed to almost completely stifle some of the key workings of government in that country. I thought to myself ‘I wonder where all the lobbyists are in Japan’, and now I see they just go by another name--all the ex-bureaucrat employees of those thousands of semi-governmental organizations...”

Any thought for retired Indian bureaucrats?

Missing Appointment files

Have papers related to appointment of senior Gujarat cadre IAS officer Rajiv Gupta as personal secretary to Union textile minister Shankersinh Vaghela in 2004, destroyed? The central information commission (CIC) has questioned as to why all files pertaining to his appointment were missing. Gupta, a 1986 batch IAS, is now the secretary of climate change department in the state.