Agencies/New Delhi

The government has scrapped membership of Delhi’s prestigious golf club for serving and retired bureaucrats as part of a crackdown on its notoriously work-shy civil servants, a report said yesterday.
The memberships had been awarded to a select group of serving and retired bureaucrats by the previous Congress government, the Hindustan Times daily said.
But Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has now scrapped the perk, cancelling memberships for 27 civil servants teeing off from the club’s plush greens and mulling the future of another 30.
The newspaper said the quota scheme organised by the urban development ministry, which oversees the club’s land, was ended after it was found to be in “contravention of rules and regulations,” without elaborating.
Congress leader Kamal Nath headed the ministry when these bureaucrats were made members of the club - the coveted playground for Delhi’s rich and famous - that has a waiting period of over four decades for new applicants.
The ministry can jump the queue as it holds a bunch of membership quotas for being the custodian of the 220-acre piece of prime real estate on which the 85-year-oldc club stands. Normally, government officials have to pay a heavily discounted membership fee of Rs300,000. Others pay Rs600,000.
Former Central Bureau of Investigation director Ranjit Sinha, former Intelligence Bureau chief Syed Asif Ibrahim, National Commission for Minorities secretary Rajiv Takru, joint secretary in the prime minister’s office Jawed Ashraf, joint secretary in the women and child development ministry I S Chahal, former parliamentary affairs secretary Desh Deepak Verma, former additional secretary in the ministry of personnel P K Misra and Indian Administrative Service officer Neeraj Kumar Gupta lost their membership on January 15.
The list has Indian Police Service officers Aloke Prasad and Rajesh Ranjan as well.
Kamal Nath could not be contacted. Club secretary Sanjiv Mehra did not shed any light. “I have joined only recently ... I can check the details tomorrow morning and tell you,” he said.
The membership gift came under two slots - tenure and extended tenure. The first category brought membership of up to five years for director and joint secretary-level officers; and till retirement for officers of additional secretary level and above.
The extended tenure varied between three to 12 years after a bureaucrat’s retirement.
It was found that 19 serving bureaucrats were given “out of turn” tenure membership. Of these, Chittaranjan Khaitan, then joint secretary in the ministry who was nominated on May 15, a day before the Congress was voted out of power, escaped the axe.
Kamal Nath’s ministry had added an “extended tenure” category and nominated 10 bureaucrats, three of them  - IB chief Ibrahim, Raajev Lakhhara (1992-batch Indian Revenue Service officer) and Atul Chaturvedi (joint secretary in the department of industrial policy and promotion) - on May 15.
“It was the decision of the ministry to nominate me and it’s again their decision to take it back,” Ibrahim said.
Shashi Kant Sharma, the comptroller and auditor general, was the lone member in this category to survive the sack. “It is news to me. But I hardly go to the club,” he said.
The sword hangs over all the remaining 30 members inducted during Kamal Nath’s tenure through “lifelong” and “limited playing facility” slots.
Some of the top names in these categories are former additional solicitor general A S Chandihok, Congress MP Deepender Singh Hooda, former railway minister Dinesh Trivedi, business executive Suhel Seth, former Congress minister Jitin Prasada, fashion designer Ritu Beri and Kamal Nath’s former private secretary Khalid Bin Jamal.
After his landslide election victory last May, Modi cracked the whip on India’s civil servants, who are notorious for arriving late, taking long lunches and whiling away afternoons on the golf course.
Modi said he was shocked by what he saw in the corridors of power after moving to Delhi.

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