The Administrative Staff College of India in Hyderabad

Patna, June 22: The Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI), Hyderabad, has shown interest in setting up a permanent cell for Bihar.

Established in 1956, ASCI’s main role has been to boost professionalism through a judicious blend of management, training, consultancy and research. Over 75,000 participants from the industry, government and non-government sectors have so far taken advantage of management development programmes offered by ASCI every year.

Sharing this information with The Telegraph, planning and development department principal secretary Vijoy Prakash said: “The offer has come from the ASCI’s side and any final decision on this front would taken after due deliberation.” So far, the state government and ASCI have held one round of discussion for exploring the possibility of setting up this permanent cell.

The likely role of this cell, if the government gives consent to its formation, would be that of providing technical help to a pool of resource persons that the state is going to create to help keep better tabs on agencies that would impact assessment work of government schemes.

Prior to giving its consent, the state government has started the process of developing a pool of resource persons whose services would taken to monitor the work of agencies and government departments entrusted with the task of conducting the impact assessment of schemes being implemented in the state and also to suggest ways for improving the process of the schemes and also to make them more user-friendly.

And to equip these resource persons with necessary skills, a workshop will be organised in Patna from July 13 to July 15 in which experts from ASCI would impart training to the participants.

Officials from the Bihar state government departments, experts from universities and other institutions having expertise in different kinds of works would be invited to the training workshop and from among them, a pool of 30 persons would be created to assess the work of government departments and agencies which would do the impact assessment of government agencies.

“The purpose of this exercise is to have a system in place using which we could do impact assessment of schemes so that the government could fine-tune them if any deficiency during the course of assessment is found,” Prakash said, adding: “The output would also help in finding out whether there is any need to introduce new schemes for achieving a desired goal is required or not.”

He said the outcome of impact assessment would also be provided to departments concerned so that policymakers could have a better idea about the impact of schemes and fine-tune it accordingly to get better results.