THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The amendments in rules of business, which intended to mobilise supreme power in the chief minister’s office, was drafted by a high-level panel which included M Sivasankar. Ministers in Pinarayi’s cabinet has created blockades on many projects in which the secretaries of various departments concerned has keen interests. The amendments in rules of business were proposed in order to bypass the intervention of ministers and to increase powers of CM’s office in granting nod to different projects.

The proposed amendments transfer key powers to the CM’s office from ministries such as law, finance and revenue. Despite, this blatant violation of the law, sources say that secretaries of these departments have not informed about these amendments to their ministers concerned. Ministers of constituent parties including CPI now say that the department secretaries might have feared the wrath of all-powerful principal secretary in CM’s office and that’s why they didn’t inform the ministers about the proposed amendments.

The high-level panel was constituted in 2018. The present chief secretary and department secretaries of law, finance and general administration were other members of the panel. There also exists a lack of consensus among the members on transferring the discretionary powers of cabinet to CM’s office, especially in granting green signal to those projects which were put on the back burner by the finance ministry.

Another controversial amendment is granting the special power to CM to summon department secretaries with any files that he wants and to take a final decision on them. If the panel’s recommendations are implemented, then state ministers fear that their role will be limited as that of a minister of state in the union cabinet.

Meanwhile, CPI has said that the party has expressed its stand on the issue through its minister, E Chandrasekharan when the matter came up for discussion in the cabinet sub-committee. If these recommendations come up for discussion in the cabinet, CPI will oppose it. The party is not creating controversy through a public statement as it thinks it would be a shot in the arm of government which is already in a precarious state due to a series of rows.

However, the chief minister has said that the recommendations of the high-level panel are under the consideration of cabinet sub-committee and a decision has not been taken on the issue. Ministers point out that giving supreme powers to CM’s office superseding even the cabinet meetings breaks away the very foundation of the democratic governance system.