It's OK to slap lazy civil servants, Indian minister declares 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 had been convicted of assaulting an official, that civil servants are lazy and that hitting them is justified. In 2011, Goa's former tourism minister Mickky Pacheco was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for slapping an official. According to the Times of India, Mr Mandrekar said: "Sometimes officials do not do any work properly and do not listen too. Then like he (Mickky 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 had not carried out their instructions. In January this year, a leader of a party which wants to create a breakaway slate in Andhra Pradesh slapped a local authority official, while a survey of members of the Maharastra state assembly found one in six had slapped government officials. Affidavits submitted by assembly members found that 50 had been charged with assaulting officials. One member, for the Shiv Sena party, a Marathi nationalist group, had been accused of slapping officials on five occasions. In the Goa assembly debate Mr Pacheco said members of the state's water resources department were lazy and need to be "put in their place."