New Delhi, Apr 15: Several chief ministers Monday kept away from a meeting here on administrative reforms.
Only seven chief minister attended the conference convened by the home ministry: Odisha (Naveen Patnaik), Assam (Tarun Gogoi), Uttarakhand (Vijay Bahuguna), Tripura (Manik Sarkar), Arunachal Pradesh (Nabam Tuki), Meghalaya (Mukul Sangma) and Nagaland (Neiphiu Rio).
Non-Congress chief ministers of West Bengal (Mamata Banerjee), Tamil Nadu (J. Jayalalithaa), Uttar Pradesh (Akhilesh Yadav), Gujarat (Narendra Modi), Bihar (Nitish Kumar), Madhya Pradesh (Shivraj Singh Chouhan) and Chhattisgarh (Raman Singh) did not attend the meeting.
The meet was given a miss by even some Congress chief ministers: Maharashtra (Prithviraj Chavan), Andhra Pradesh (N. Kiran Kumar Reddy), Rajasthan (Ashok Gehlot), Kerala (Oommen Chandy), Manipur (O. Ibobi Singh) and Himachal Pradesh (Virbhadra Singh).
Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, who had initially given his consent, did not attend it. On behalf of Delhi, the meet was attended by Lt Governer Tejinder Khanna.
The meeting was attended by several central ministers who are members of the Group of Ministers on Administrative Reforms.
They included Petroleum Minister M. Verappa Moily, Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal, Road Transport and Highway Minister C.P. Joshi, Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh, Ministers of State V. Narayanasami, RPN Singh and Mullappally Ramachandran.
