Rahul brings monthly monitoring to Congress

Gandhi had earlier applied this method of accountability in Youth Congress

On being appointed the Congress Vice-President in January, Rahul Gandhi had spoken of “accountability within the party and among its office bearers.” By introducing a monthly monitoring system for all All India Congress Committee (AICC) secretaries recently, the Gandhi scion is taking steps towards that within the main organisation and, thereby, replicating some of the experiments he had done with the Youth Congress.

Secretaries, assigned to work under general-secretaries, and whose role till now had largely been ornamental, are now being assessed on their performance. Secretaries are expected to fill a pro forma specifying details of the results achieved and the processes used to achieve those and give these details to the Congress Vice-President by the 10th of every month.

Significantly it was Rahul Gandhi who had personally interviewed these secretaries before appointing them and several Youth Congress members were upgraded to these posts.

In the run-up to the Assembly elections in five states and general elections in 2014, this has assumed greater importance, as there have been several complaints that performance was being ignored in the party.

The new pro forma asks the secretaries to specify the number of District Congress Committees (DCCs) and Block Congress Committees (BCCs) assigned to them that have held regular meetings, the percentage of those that have held the monthly meetings and the number of DCCs and BCCs meetings a particular AICC secretary has attended.

Since the pro forma has been introduced from this month (September 14), secretaries have been asked to give the details by September 20 of those DCCs and BCCs that have held monthly meetings in August.

Gandhi has been stressing that both general-secretaries and secretaries should visit districts more often and secretaries being younger should do it more often.