The entire country may be riding the IT bandwagon, but someone sure forgot to tell the mandarins in the nation's capital. Bureaucrats and political bosses in the National Capital Territory are slugging it out over the IT policy. The Delhi chief secretary has several objections to the policy prepared by the IT department which is headed by another senior IAS officer. Thus, the draft policy is shuttling between departments, with objections and counter-objections being added daily. Junior officers, who were initially enthusiastic about the policy, which includes conversion of STD/ISD booths into Internet cafes, are naturally a trifle disappointed, but then they don't carry the clout to do much about it. Human Resource Development Minister Dr Murli Manohar Joshi is a strange man. For his favourites -- and there are not very many of them -- he is an inspirational father figure. But for the rest, life alongside him could be a nightmare. As Santosh Gangwar, who was minister of state for science and technology before moving to the petroleum department, realised to his dismay. Gangwar was not allocated an office in the S&T ministry, which has several sprawling campuses in the capital. He escaped further trauma thanks to a change in portfolio in the last ministerial reshuffle. His replacement is Bachi Singh Rawat, the man who, within a week of being appointed as minister of state for defence, gave out the 'national secret' about the development of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, Surya. The man from Uttarakhand is reportedly a favourite of Dr Joshi. So it is perhaps natural that he is being showered with favours: offices in almost every department of S&T and other facilities are only the beginning. In the previous government, Dr Joshi's junior minister, Uma Bharti, kept away from her Shastri Bhavan office for more than six months, in protest against her senior's 'style of functioning'. Finally, the prime minister intervened and give her independent charge of a ministry. Out of Dr Joshi's bailiwick now, Uma Bharti is over-enthusiastically pushing forward her great plans for the tourism ministry. And what better opportunity can there be than the impending millennium! She decided to hold a luxury cruise for ministers, journalists and bureaucrats from Calcutta to Kachal, the remote island off Andaman and Nicobar where the first light of millennium was supposed to fall before the honour shifted to Dong in Arunachal Pradesh. Ever since the news broke of the cruise, Bharti finds herself in an embarrassing situation. Several ministers took objection to the fact that her ministry decided to publish their names without their approval, since many of them, like Arun Jaitley for one, had decided to spend their own money ushering in the new millennium. While on journalists, here is the latest. According to reliable senior scribes, the appointment of H K Dua, who is not known for his ideological compatibility with the BJP, as media advisor to the prime minister has left several BJP-oriented scribes unhappy. Dua was also then prime minister H D Deve Gowda's media advisor. At least one senior scribe, closely identified with the BJP and heading a newspaper group run by a Bombay-based business house, is the saddest of them all. He has been kept away from the PMO, and appointed as the head of a media institute. Delhi journalism has just witnessed a 'divorce' of sorts that has raised several eyebrows. Shekhar Bhatia, the suave editor of The Asian Age, has resigned. Bhatia has been with Age Editor-in-Chief M J Akbar through thick and thin, theirs being among the oldest associations in the profession. Cynical scribes used to mock Bhatia, who had earlier edited The Telegraph, for his loyalty to Akbar, but everyone who knows him admires his organisational capacity and ability to put out a good newspaper. The media world cannot be without its set of controversies. The arrest and reports about the alleged extortion racket run by deputy enforcement director Ashok Agarwal and a Congress MP's son Abhishek Verma seems to have embarrassed several senior scribes. Some of them had gone to town with stories allegedly planted by Agarwal against former ED chief M K Bezbaruah, and a weekly even hinted that the upright IAS officer was involved in several scandals. This happened towards the end of Bezbaruah's term in ED, and there were no government denials to it. Even after the latest controversy involving the duo appeared in the newspaper, Verma, the flamboyant son of Rajya Sabha MP Veena Verma, continues to make grand appearances at parties. At one get-together last week, a couple of days before he was arrested, Verma was seen lecturing a group of journalists about how to become rich. There are three ways, he said. One, being born rich, the other to work hard, and the third to take a shortcut. He took the last way, Verma boasted. Correspondent Josy Joseph keeps an Argus eye on the capital.
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