When Omita Paul cleaned her desk at North Block to move in as secretary to president Pranab Mukherjee, RTI expert Devashish Bhattacharya wondered why she isn’t called principal secretary like Pulok Chatterjee was to prime minister Manmohan Singh.

Bhattacharya tells me that his wasn’t a semantic differentiation between ‘secretary’ and ‘principal secretary,’ but a deeper question on the inter se hierarchy between president of India and our country’s prime minister.

The subtext was simple.

Everyone knows that our country’s president is above the PM in the Official Warrant of Precedence (WOP) – and so is the vice-president, by the way.
So, why is the reverse true for the chiefs of their back offices, Paul and Chatterji?

Devashish also deep dived a bit and asked for data from the time the two offices were created, the prime minister on August 15, 1947, and the president from January 26, 1950.

What’s emerged is sad. The office of the head of the Indian State doesn’t have ready access to the names and levels of the relevant men from the steel frame (there hasn’t been a woman as secretary to the president).

Not just that, the president’s office is apparently so short of bandwidth that it won’t even attempt a task as this “will require compilation that would disproportionately divert its resources!”

Ha!

Mercifully, the president’s office did have a lowly babu to pass the buck on to the ministry of home affairs (MHA), repository of the WOP.
Now, what does MHA have to aver?

“The Secretary to President (Paul) is placed in Article 23 vide its own notification dated July 26, 1979.” But hear this. “The Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister (Pulok Chatterjee) is not (even) formally included in the Table of Precedence.”

Wow!

The sting, perhaps, lies in the tail. Unlike the president’s office, the PMO did have the resources (!) to procure an entire list of 22 men and Sarla Grewal who have been serving the prime ministers since Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. But personal files of 11 of these 23 officers are either unavailable or have been destroyed!

I repeat, personal files of HVR Iyenger, AV Pai, Dharma Vira, BN Kaul, and K Ram, all designated then as principal private secretary to prime minister have been “destroyed”!

LK Jha then followed as the first official to be designated secretary to PM. He was then followed by PN Haksar, the all-powerful bureaucrat with the title, principal secretary to PM.

Such is our disdain for institutional memory that files of both Jha and Haksar have been officially “destroyed” too (June 24, 1972 and November 15, 1989 respectively)!

Now, Haksar was replaced by PN Dhar and his file exists, but the next man Krishnaswamy Rao Sahib’s has been destroyed on March 11, 1999!

The inconsistent treatment of these repositories of work in the office of the nation’s chief executive doesn’t end here.

Files of Dr PC Alexander and Sarla Grewal coming after Krishnaswamy Rao Sahib exist, but the file of BG Deshmukh who came in after them was destroyed on December 12, 2001. Why?

Surely, Devashish’s innocent question on inter se hierarchy between the heads of the president’s office and the PMO wasn’t meant to kick up so much.

[NB: After Deshmukh, prime ministers were served by:
SK Misra (as principal secretary but in apex scale),
AN Verma (as principal secretary but in super-apex scale),
KR Venugopal (as secretary in apex scale),
BN Yugandhar (as secretary in apex scale),
TR Satishchandran (principal secretary in super-apex scale),
NN Vohra (as OSD/principal secretary in super-apex scale),
Brajesh Mishra (as principal secretary in super-apex scale),
TKA Nair (as principal secretary in super-apex scale) and
presently Pulok Chatterjee (principal secretary in super-apex scale).

Amidst such confusion, are you surprised that secretaries like NK Singh and S Narayan, under Brajesh Mishra, Narayan as economic advisor with the rank of secretary; and MN Prasad who worked under TKA Nair as secretary to PM, aren’t even part of the PMO’s own statement!

 “Apex scale” is the pay band allocated to a secretary to govt of India. It has typically been Rs 3,500 (III Pay Commission), Rs 8,000 (IV Pay Commission), Rs 26,000 (V Pay Commission), and Rs 80,000 pm (VI Pay Commission). The corresponding “super-apex scale” is the pay band allocated to cabinet secretary, [ie, Rs 4,000, Rs 9,000, Rs 30,000, and Rs 90,000 at present.]

They say “institutional memory” defines great institutions. Either that’s an outdated notion, or the president’s office and our PMO are exceptions. Right?!

(Tweets @therohitbansal)