New Delhi, Feb 13: As the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) gets relocated from the South Block building in Raisina Hills to a newly constructed buildling ‘Seva Teerth’, this not only marks a milestone in the highest office’s history but also puts on record a profound shift in the popular public mindset, since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power.
The calibrated effort to do away with structures reflective of the colonial past and to rename and rebrand public institutions underscores the Modi government’s focus and thrust on making public service the high point of its governance. Renaming and relocating the PMO to ‘Seva Teerth’ is a step in the same direction.
However, this is not a one-off step. While Seva Teerth serves as the new hub of PMO, accommodating offices like the Cabinet Secretariat, the National Security Advisor’s office, and India House, the Kartayva Bhavans 1 & 2 have also been inaugurated, from where several high-profile ministries, including Defence and External Affairs, will now function in an integrated fashion.
This shows that the Centre is firm on making “citizen-first” the centrestage of governance and shedding the image of an authority that those buildings continued to serve. Prior to this, several state governments and Union Territories (UTs) were renamed Lieutenant Governors’ residences from Raj Niwas to Lok Niwas, acting on the directive of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), as the latter argued that the old nomenclature “smacked of colonialism”.
Earlier in 2022, Rajpath was renamed Kartavya Path, and the renamed stretch was formally inaugurated in September of the same year. The rechristening of the historic stretch reaffirmed the government’s intent to replace “entitlement with duty”. In 2016, the Prime Minister’s residence was renamed as Lok Kalyan Marg.
The move may have looked small at the time, but it was high on messaging, serving as a reminder to the public that the core purpose of governance was public welfare. For ages, the Prime Minister’s residence was known as 7 Race Course Road (RCR).
‘Seva Teerth’ is now the new address for PMO. With the Cabinet Secretariat and the NSA’s office housed in the same complex, the iconic structure will rewrite the way the PMO functions, putting the spirit of service and national priorities above all else.
All this reinforces Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision that the colonial-era legacy is done away with and new ‘Indian-ised’ institutions are established with entrenched values of responsibility and public service.
IANS
