Defence Minister Rajnath Singh has approved a proposal for the abolition of 9,304 posts in the Military Engineering Service (MES), the Defence Ministry said on Thursday.
This is in line with the recommendations of the Lt. Gen. D.B. Shekatkar (Retd.) Committee, which had suggested measures to enhance combat capability and rebalance armed forces’ expenditure.
“In line with the recommendations made by the Committee, based on the proposal of Engineer-in-Chief, MES, the proposal of abolition of 9,304 posts in MES out of the total 13,157 vacancies of the basic and industrial staff has been approved by the Defence Minister,” the Ministry said in a statement.
One of the recommendations was to restructure the civilian workforce in a manner that the work of the MES could be partly done by departmentally employed staff and other works could be outsourced, it stated.
It was aimed at making the MES an effective organisation with a leaner workforce, well equipped to handle complex issues in the emerging scenario in an efficient and cost- effective manner, it added.
The 11-member committee, appointed by the late Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar in 2016 with a broad mandate, had made about 99 recommendations from optimising defence budget to the need for a Chief of the Defence Staff.
The recommendations, if implemented over the next five years, can result in savings of up to ₹25,000 crore in defence expenditure. Of these, the first batch of 65 recommendations pertaining to the Army were approved in August 2017.
