Officials in the Union Urban Development Ministry’s Central Public Works Department (CPWD) are waiting for their ‘ache din’ (good days) to begin. The Department has been for the past one year, awaiting the announcement of a promotion panel for half a dozen top slots that will all fall vacant soon.
Apart from several chief engineers who have been in line for promotion for the past few months, the employees allege the post of special director general (one level below the top slot of director general) is also vacant since April this year.
“There has been an inordinate delay in the formation of the panel that is sent to the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) for finalising the promotions. As per a DoPT order, all panels for recommending names should be drafted and sent to the UPSC at least a year in advance so that by the time the vacancies arise, the names of the candidates are finalised. As per that order, the panel should have been ready by July 2013 for the vacancies that will arise in the financial year 2014-15. But that has not happened,” said an employee on condition of anonymity.
The incumbent DG, VK Gupta will retire at the end of this month; he will be replaced by a special DG, RK Singh who too retires after a month in office in September. There are six slots of additional DG, of which two are vacant and three will fall vacant in the next few months. “By now the panel should have recommended the names for the special DG’s position and for the ADGs posts. Some officials were eligible for their promotions at the beginning of this year, and because of this delay, a few will either retire before the get promoted or will spend as little as a two months in their new promotions, which is demoralising for the whole department,” said the employee.
The recent move of sending the panel of names to directly from the Cabinet Secretariat to the Prime Minister’s Office, instead of first sending it to the Union Home Ministry, has also been welcomed by the employees as it cuts down on the waiting time.
“The procedure was tedious, first the UD Ministry would send the proposal to the DoPT, they in turn would send it to Cabinet Secretariat then it would go to the Home Minister, all of this would take months on end. The new system of sending it directly to the PMO and then to the Home Ministry is a welcome step,” said another official.
CPWD employees who were recently at the receiving end of UD Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu’s ire for not turning up on time are now waiting for the Minister to crack the whip on the “higher-ups” who have “delayed” the process. A spokesperson for the UD Ministry however said the recommendations have been sent to the concerned departments and the new appointments would be announced soon.
