New Delhi: The Narendra Modi government has decided that officers of the premier civil services will now undergo five-day combined workshops at the multi-crore Statue of Unity in Narmada district, Gujarat, after they complete their foundation course training.

Newly-recruited officers in civil services such as the IAS, IPS, IFS, etc., undergo their foundation course training in different academies soon after they are hired by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC). According to the current practice, they go to their respective cadres on completion of the training, but the government now wants to institute a five-day workshop for all the services combined at Sardar Patel’s statue, sources in the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration told ThePrint.

The workshops will have different themes every year, and famous personalities may be called in to speak on these themes to the new batch of civil servants, an official at the academy said.

This year’s workshop is expected to be held in October and the theme is ‘How to achieve the goal of making India a 5 trillion dollar economy’ — an ambition Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to realise by 2024.

Choice of the venue is symbolic

The UPSC had announced the list of selected candidates for the 2018 batch in April this year, and the candidates are presently undergoing training for their respective foundation courses.

The themes are expected to give a vision of PM Modi’s ambition for the country to the young officers, who will eventually assume critical roles in decision-making and administration.

The choice of the venue is symbolic as Patel, the first home minister of the country, had famously called the civil services the “steel frame” of India’s government machinery. Four months before the country’s independence in 1947, Patel had also delivered an impassioned speech to the country’s civil servants on 21 April — which is observed as Civil Services Day.

Earlier, the Modi government had proposed that civil servants be allotted cadres and services on the basis of a unified foundation course, as opposed to the current practice of allotment on the basis of rankings in the UPSC exam. The latest plan, however, has nothing to do with that proposal, sources said.

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