Having come under the scanner of Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) for excessive staff, the Meghalaya Assembly Secretariat has decided to rope in Shillong IIM to determine the “optimum” employees required.
“The CAG report has mentioned about the excessive staff. We have taken it seriously. The Shillong IIM has been entrusted with a project to study the exact manpower requirement,” Assembly Speaker Charles Pyngrope said.
According to the CAG, though the existing strength (of the secretariat) sanctioned by the finance department was 327.
“But between January 2000 to May 2008, the secretariat appointed an additional 417 staff on temporary basis in excess of the sanctioned strength at a fixed rate of pay plus allowances,” the CAG report, tabled in the assembly recently, said.
“The secretariat incurred unauthorized expenditure of Rs. 8.59 crore on entertainment of 417 staff during January 2000 to June 2009,” the CAG said.
The Speaker said the IIM study, which will commence this week, will seek to identify the places where the secretariat is weak and places where it is overburdened. “We will try to bring a balance in the manpower requirement,” he said.
Mr. Pyngrope said the next phase would be training of the unskilled staff in order to get maximum output from them.
The IIM study, to be conducted by the institution’s Planning and Research wing, is expected to take one month time.
