Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee is upset with the lousy drafting of notes submitted by the top bureaucrats in the government for consideration by the Cabinet or the Group of Ministers (GoM) that he got a circular issued that "notes should be of a high quality and procedurally compliant."

Stressing that the notes meant for GoM should be in line with the procedures, a Cabinet Secretariat circular cites Mukherjee pointing out mistakes galore in the notes submitted to him for one of many GoM meetings he chairs.

It adds: "In some cases, it is seen that the notes forwarded by the ministries/departments are often rushed one or two days prior to the scheduled meeting, which hardly leaves any time for scrutiny.

This is one of half a dozen such circulars issued only this year, including one in which the bureaucrats were pulled up for padding up notes with unnecessary jargon that confuses more than throwing more light on the issues under discussion. Yet another circular wanted the bureaucrats to give full form of acronyms and abbreviations in the first reference and better avoid those not common.

Once a political science lecturer in a South 24-Paranas college, Mukherjee is quite strict is use of words by anyone in the government. That was the theme of the lecture he gave to the newly-elected Congress MLAs in Kolkata in July.

Mukherjee is not the first to frown at the notes not passing the muster as only a few months ago Prime Minister Manmohan Singh too expressed unhappiness over the poor quality of English and grammatical mistakes in notes sent to the Cabinet.