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To ensure full involvement of
staff, Professor Gamaniel put together a two-day retreat of intense,
open, frank and interactive session by the staff and Management in order
to address the performance, significant achievement, problems, strategies
and the way forward for NIPRD. The retreat put a very bright spotlight on
the frustrations of the Institute.
There were criticisms and
analysis prepared by humanistically minded spokesmen from different
departments and units of the Institute. The new DG came to grips with the
issues. Winnowing out significant facts from verbal presentations,
Professor Gamaniel urged the Research Fellows and workers to do away with
relatively fixed habits of mind and maintain a spirit of team work and
humor even in the face of exhaustion. He noted that disjointedness and
lack of team work is a principal reason why research and development of
phytomedicines feel crippled in NIPRD.
But the Director-General and his
team of management staff are getting everybody kind of enthused to change
the hill. Many of the unnecessary rough spots in the daily lives of the
workers, they promise will be smoothed out. They are setting out on the
come-back trail in a significant revitalizing move. Rarely has the search
for omens been as anxious as now. Professor Gamaniel, who never concealed
his distaste for laziness raised the hope of all in NIPRD. Yet, true hope
is not a mere pie-in-the-sky optimism, an insipid belief that we will get
whatever we want or that every little thing will work out just fine.
With an articulate and
hard-driving adversary like electric power and low budgetary allocation
attacking from the right, professor Gamaniel may find his room for
maneuver increasingly constrained. He may be struggling to perform a
delicate tightrope act. But NIPRD talking on the need to increase her
budgetary allocation has not been sufficiently balanced by listening over
the years. The darker realities are often too much to bear. But Professor
Gamaniel insists that the present administration in the country will listen to his plea
for increased budgetary allocation. This was also in response to the
worker’s complaints that weak wage growth and taxes are squeezing
incomes. >>
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