Triple first for a mandarin...

Triple first for a mandarin with a bedtime deadline.
The Civil Service has appointed Britain's first Asian Permanent Secretary. Aged 42, he is the youngest Whitehall Permanent Secretary, and the most junior of the current 22 by at least five years.
Suma Chakrabarti (70-76), who took up his £120000 post at the Department for International Affairs in February, achieved another first in agreeing a special deal with his minister to spend more time at home with his daughter. While his colleagues work 12 to 14 hour days for their ministerial masters, he breakfasts with his six year old daughter, Maya, in Oxford and starts work at 9:30am. He leaves the department by 5:30pm every night so that he can see his daughter before she goes to bed, and works at home every other Friday so that he can attend morning assembly at her school.
Suma Chakrabarti, who was born in Jalpaiguri, a small town in Bengal, and spent his first five years in Calcutta, has risen swiftly through the Civil Service ranks and is a breath of fresh air in Whitehall. Spotted by Downing Street talent scouts soon after Labour won power in 1997, he was quickly appointed from the Treasury (where he was responsible for public expenditure planning) to set up the Prime Minister's Performance and Innovation Unit in the Cabinet Office. He next became Head of the Economic and Domestic Secretariat, Cabinet Office, and then Director-general of regional programmes at the Department of International Development, at the height of the crisis in Afghanistan last October. Though proud of his achievement he is anxious that ethnic minority staff should move higher up the service. 'Overall the Civil Service does not really reflect the society it is drawing its labour from, particularly in the senior ranks.' He admits that he has had an easier ride than most of his colleagues from ethnic minority backgrounds but he has experienced racist remarks. 'They are minor things such as "Oh, you speak very good English," or "you write very well" but they are condescending and patronising.'
Like many of his peers he went to an independent school (City of London, where he was an ILEA scholar) and then Oxford (New College) to study PPE, but Suma Chakrabarti is keen to challenge the working practices of the archetypal mandarin. Determined to ensure that his staff have a better balance between their personal and working lives than most civil servants, he is to issue new guidance for his department. The booklet will promote flexible working hours, job shares, home working, career breaks and secondments. He is keen to promote effective business and management practices. An enthusiastic supporter of modernisation in Whitehall, he wants his staff to think more quickly and take more risks. He is happy to recruit outsiders where they can add skills and talents, but is not 'a fetishist about outsiders having better ideas than insiders'.
[Adapted from an article by Jill Sherman in The Times, 14 January 2002]