Mumbai: In a major administrative restructuring exercise aimed at improving efficiency and reducing operational costs, the commerce and industry ministry plans to merge 20 offices housing 12 organisations across Mumbai into a single integrated campus, a template which may be repeated in other parts of the country.Addressing a press conference, commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal said the Mumbai exercise would serve as a pilot project for a nationwide consolidation drive being planned by his ministry and added that the National Productivity Council has been tasked with coordinating preliminary studies to examine how similar integration can be implemented across the country.The proposed campus will serve as a one-stop hub for citizens seeking services related to the ministry and will also digitally connect users to all 46 organisations functioning under the commerce ministry, including bodies that currently do not have offices in Mumbai, such as the Spice Board and the Marine Products Export Development Authority.Goyal said the move would streamline administration while substantially cutting expenditure on rent, housekeeping, hospitality and other overheads.“This step will have long-term ramifications for how the government works,” the minister said, adding that the initiative was designed to create a more citizen-centric and efficient system.Explaining the rationale behind the consolidation, Goyal said the present arrangement had resulted in uneven utilisation of office space across the city. “There are some large offices with very few people working in them and there are tiny offices with many people working in them, so to promote efficiency this is a logical step,” he said.He added that a review of existing office premises across Mumbai is currently underway and that the ministry would soon identify a suitable site for the unified campus.When asked about the future of the smaller offices that would become vacant after consolidation, Goyal said the govt would seek productive use for the properties. “We will put it to whatever productive use we can put it to. For example, recently we handed over an office building to the state government to house the Maharashtra Institution for Transformation (MITRA), from which we are earning Rs 2 crore a year in rent,” he said.
