Civil servants should be slapped by their political masters if they do not follow orders clearly and work hard, an Indian minister said.
In a state assembly debate, Goa's water and civil supplies minister Dayanand Mandrekar said he agreed with the state's former tourism minister - who was convicted of assaulting an official - that hitting civil servants who are lazy is justified. Mickky Pacheco, the minister in question, was sentenced to a year in jail in 2011.
According to the Times of India, Mandrekar said: "Sometimes officials do not do any work properly and do not listen.
"Then like, [Pacheco] said, they should be slapped.''
There have been a series of incidents throughout India in the last few years of political leaders slapping civil servants who have not carried out their instructions.
In January, a leading member of a party which wants to create a breakaway slate in Andhra Pradesh slapped a local authority official.
A survey of members of the Maharastra state assembly found one in six had slapped officials.
Affidavits submitted by assembly members found that 50 had been charged with assaulting officials.
One member of the Shiv Sena party, a Marathi nationalist group, had been accused of slapping officials on five occasions.
In the Goa assembly debate Pacheco said that members of the water resources department were often lazy and needed to be "put in their place".
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