Why government officers are suddenly talking about the sparrow

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi gestures as he addresses a gathering during a conference of start-up businesses in New Delhi, India, January 16, 2016. Indian Prime Minister Modi launched a number of initiatives on Saturday to support the country's start-ups, including a 100 billion rupee ($1.5 billion) fund and a string of tax breaks for both the companies and their investors. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi - RTX22ONI

'Sparrow' is now a trending topic among the country's bureaucrats, but it has nothing to do with the rapidly declining population of the birds notorious for building nests in homes. Instead, it has do with a performance appraisal system.

The Modi government has extended its penchant for acronyms in starting SPARROW - Smart Performance Appraisal Report Recording Online Window. The portal intends to take the appraisal process online and is part of efforts to look into the performance of all officers who have either turned 50 years of age or 55 or have been in service for 30 years to take a call on whether they should continue or compulsorily retired, according to a report in The Economic Times.

The Department of Personnel and Training also recently started an Online Probity Management System – commonly known internally as the Probity portal – to monitor the integrity and performance of officers across ministries.

A government official was quoted as saying that through the Probity portal, ministries can do away with paperwork and submit their reports online, enabling the government to get an overview at one place.

The portal is applicable to the Indian Administrative Service and 12 other cadres.

Jitendra Singh, Minister of State for DoPT, said last week that 30 Group A officers - including IAS and IFS - and 99 Group B (lower tier) officers had been asked to retire in recent months.

As part of its non-performance surveillance drive, the government is looking into the service records of another 34,451 Group A officers and 42,521 Group B officers.

Probity and SPARROW will work in conjunction with each other, the official said.

Since coming to power in 2014, the Modi government has been keen to change the work culture of bureaucrats to increase efficiency. Apart from measures to prevent officers from sitting on files, the Union government had earlier launched a biometric attendance system to keep a tab on the whereabouts of bureaucrats during work hours.