Centre approves mass promotion of 1,592 assistant section officers

New Delhi: The Centre has approved the mass promotion of 1,592 assistant section officers to the post of section officers with immediate effect, Union Minister Jitendra Singh said on Tuesday.

He said the promotion orders will be issued soon by the respective cadre controlling authorities.

“Government has been granting mass promotions to employees to motivate them and overcome the problem of long stagnation. Another 2,000 promotions in ASO and other grades are in process and hopefully, they will get promoted by this year’s end,” said Singh, the minister of state for personnel.

The move assumes significance as the Central Secretariat Service (CSS) officers’ association had written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking his intervention to ensure the promotion of ASOs to the grade of Section Officers.

“The Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), Ministry of Personnel, has approved the mass promotion of 1,592 officials working in the capacity of ASOs to the post of section officers on an ad-hoc basis with immediate effect,” Singh said.

He said in the last nine years, under the guidance of Modi, the government has periodically reviewed the longstanding stagnation issues in various central ministries that are a legacy of the past due to pending court cases, lack of vacancies in higher grades and other personnel issues.

The minister said, last year also about 9,000 mass promotions were made and before that, the DoPT granted 4,000 promotions in the preceding three years.

Singh said he personally feels disturbed to come across cases where some of the employees working in the lowest rung of the administration spend their entire service tenure of 30 to 35 years without securing a single promotion.

The minister said he has discussed the issue with all the senior officers in the personnel ministry and several innovative means have been evolved to avoid stagnation at the middle and lower rungs of the administration.

“Taking a step further to fulfil the vision of Prime Minister Modi, more than 1,500 ASOs of CSS cadre have been promoted to the grade of SO in one go. Now there is no shortage of SOs and ministries/departments will function at almost full strength of SOs accelerating the efficient delivery of public service,” said Udit Arya, President of CSS Forum, expressing happiness over the mass promotion.

He said that the Centre has also set up a committee for cadre restructuring of the central secretariat.

“It is expected that the PMO will approve the enhanced new strength of the CSS cadre (SO/US/DS/Director/JS) in cadre restructuring,” Arya said.

Singh also regretted that in a large number of cases, stagnation in promotions was the result of litigation amongst the employees themselves and even though the DoPT tries its best to put forward its view in the court of law, the delay becomes inevitable, according to a personnel ministry statement.

“PM Modi has made efforts to ensure that government jobs are available to the maximum extent possible. It is extremely painful and disheartening to see employees sometimes superannuating in the same grade as promotions remained stuck,” he added.

The orders for mass promotion of these employees belonging to the CSS have been issued after several rounds of high-level meetings in the DoPT chaired by Singh in the last few months, the statement said.

The minister said, even legal experts were consulted as some of the orders are subject to the outcome of pending writ petitions.

To bring in the ease of governance as well as objectivity in empanelment, the government has, in the last nine years, improvised upon the procedures to ensure that there are no subjective preferences involved in carrying out the promotions.

“Procedures have been made more hi-tech using sophisticated technology tools to minimise the human interface,” he added.

Singh said the Modi government has done away with more than 1,600 rules which were either obsolete or had become irrelevant with time.

“All this is meant not only to ensure effective and timely delivery of outcomes for the public but also to enable the employees to perform to the best of their ability,” the minister said.