Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER), MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances, Pensions, Atomic Energy and Space, Dr Jitendra Singh, inaugurated the IAS Professional Course Phase-II (2018 Batch) of the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA), Mussoorie, through a video conference.
The programme has 179 officers of the IAS batch of 2018, three officers from the batch of 2017 and three from the Royal Bhutan Civil Services participating in the Phase II this year.
This is the first time that an IAS Professional Course has been inaugurated online. Of the 185 participants, almost 125 belong to the engineering field or have some professional background. The batch this year also has 50 women officers.
The Learning Management System (LMS) known as GYAN is used at LBSNAA, to provide a one-point access online platform for the participants or learners. The participants can log in and access anything relating to the course, such as power points, reading material, live classes on video, assignments, quizzes, past classes and so on.
This is all part of the series of changes initiated by the Prime Minister in the last five to six years, with an aim to give a new orientation and direction to bureaucracy in India. One such initiative was to allow IAS officers to perform a three-month stint as assistant secretaries, with the Central Government at the beginning of their career. The practice that began a few years back has contributed significantly to building the capacity of these officers. The amendment in the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988 brought about in 2018 protects honest officers from harassment, by including the bribe giver into the ambit of the Act.
Another initiative, the integrated government online training (iGOT) platform is also part of the changes initiated recently. Till date, over 25 lakh officers have registered on the iGoT platform of the Department of Personnel Training (DoPT), which is equipped to fulfil the training needs of frontline workers tackling COVID-19. The same platform has helped train IAS officers, and transform them into corona warriors too.
