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New Delhi. On the orders of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in the ongoing cleaning drive in Central Government Offices, almost twice as much space as the floor area of ​​Rashtrapati Bhawan should be vacant by the end of this month. Will go According to the information received by , 3.18 lakh square feet space in government offices has been freed from files in this mega drive which started on October 2. In this sequence, 7.3 lakh files have been removed. The floor area of ​​Rashtrapati Bhavan is about 2 lakh square feet. A senior official in the government told , ‘A total of 9 lakh 31 thousand 442 government files have been marked for deletion by the end of this month. 78 percent work has been completed. The work is going on on a war footing.

The biggest thing is that the government has earned Rs 4.29 crore by disposing of these useless files. In such a situation, the question is, which ministry had the maximum number of files, which have been disposed of? The Environment Ministry is at the forefront of this matter, which had 99 thousand such files, which have been disposed of. At the same time, 81 thousand files were with the Ministry of Home Affairs, 80 thousand with the Railways, about 50 thousand files with the CBI and CBDT. The senior official said that the vacant space in government offices is unprecedented.

Focus on clearing pending files
An important aspect in this campaign is also to deal with the pendency of references received from MPs and parliamentary assurances by various ministries. The government has found that about 10,273 references were received by MPs to various ministries, which were pending. Ideally, these files are to be disposed of within 15 days. According to the information received by , about 5500 of these references have now been settled. The ministers themselves have responded to these letters.

In such a situation, Union Ministers Ashwini Vaishnav and Nitin Gadkari have had to sign the maximum number of letters, because the ministries of both the ministers had the most pending references. Railways had received 2700 reference letters by MPs, out of which more than 1700 have been disposed of, while the Ministry of Roads and Highways had around 900 pending references, out of which 400 letters have been disposed of. The ministers have so far replied to 659 out of 2,340 pending letters related to parliamentary assurances.

205 cabinet draft also pending
The officials were also surprised to learn that 205 cabinet drafts related to inter-ministerial references were also pending. Of these, 135 have been disposed of during the cleanliness drive. At the same time, 1201 pending references sent by the Chief Ministers of different states are also being reviewed. Of these cases, 700 have been answered. All these have been signed by the Union Ministers themselves. In addition, 784 rules and procedures have also been identified, out of which 606 have been simplified.

Disposal of public grievances also in priority
Priority is also being given to the redressal of public grievances under the campaign. In this sequence, pending files for more than 45 days were identified, with a total number of 74,806. Of these, more than 50 thousand files have now been disposed of. Let us inform that a total of 22,784 complaints were made by the people under the Public Grievance Process, out of which half have been settled. The Central Government has received 18.2 lakh complaints this year under the Public Grievances Process, out of which 16.8 lakh have been disposed of.

PM ordered to run campaign
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on October 2 this month ordered a mega drive to clear unnecessary government files and create free space in offices. Along with this, he had also talked about the references received from the MPs and redressal of public grievances. The cabinet secretary had written a letter in this context to run the campaign between October 2 and October 31, and first published the report on September 20. However, all the ministries started the process of identifying the pending files for disposal under the campaign in September itself.

How long are the files kept?
Government officials told that government files are of three categories, the first being category A, which has an archive value, these files are from 1947 to 1996, they are sent to the National Archive after indexing, and there These files are protected. Category B files are those which are kept for 10 years. At the same time, the third category is C, which is kept for 3 years. These files are deleted after the expiry of the time limit, but the work was not done for a long time, the official said.

Emphasis on adopting e-office system
The government has found that 18.46 lakh files are lying with it for review, out of which about 80 percent ie 14.7 lakh files have been reviewed. In the end, the government selected 9 lakh 31 thousand 442 files for disposal. Initially, the government thought that it would have to deal with only 2.5 lakh files, but the number of files in the review turned out to be very high. The senior official said, “We have 27 lakh e-files and we are rapidly moving towards e-office system. In such a situation, the number of physical files will also be reduced.