Bureaucracy apprehensive on promotion policy

Officers believe clause on discretionary marks could give rise to an unjust system

KARACHI:

The new promotion policy introduced for the Sindh government appears to have ruffled some feathers within the provincial bureaucracy.

Officials have come to fore with strong reservations, particularly questioning the provision of discretionary marks to the Provincial Selection Board and the suspension of promotion of the concerned officers till the end of the NAB probe.

Per the new promotion policy, it is mandatory to get a fixed percentage of marks listed in three different categories to promote officers from grades 19 to 21. These include 40 per cent marks on performance evaluation reports of officers, 30 per cent marks on training evaluation, and 30 per cent marks on evaluation of Provincial Selection Boards.

In regard to this rubric, the strongest reservations have been about the 30 per cent marks placed on the evaluation of the selection boards.

The telling reason here is that the marks required for promotion will be entirely at the discretion of the members of the selection boards to give to whoever they want or not.

Under the new promotion policy, officers who get 21 to 30 marks from the selection board will be counted in category A. While the officers who get 11 to 20 marks will be in category B, and the officers who get one to 10 marks will be in category C. According to sources in the provincial bureaucracy, officers fear that the members of the Provincial Selection Boards may use their discretionary marks to appease officers of their choice, while officers who are not in their good books might be destined to category C with low tier marks.

Expressing his concerns, Zahid Hussain, who is a Grade 19 officer said that empowering the selection board with discretionary marks in the new promotion policy will be discriminatory. Whereas Arshad Hussain, who is a Grade 17 officer, claimed that it was unreasonable of the promotion policy to have a clause to stop the promotion of officers due to investigations by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) or other agencies. Per Hussain, there are NAB investigations underway for more than 1,000 officers in the Sindh province.

He said that any officer is innocent till proven guilty, and to deprive them of their rights based on mere accusation or investigation would be utterly unfair.

Speaking in the regard, the Provincial Minister Syed Nasir Hussain Shah said there would be no injustice with any government employee. “The new promotion policy has been formulated keeping in view the promotion policy of the federal government; nothing new has been included in it,” he told The Express Tribune.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 20^th, 2022.