The Hyderabad Development Authority (HDA) has drawn a line to prevent non-accredited officers from taking the top positions sanctioned only for the accredited engineers.
The HDA Secretary Abdul Mannan Shaikh in a rejoinder on Tuesday to HDA Diploma Engineers Association on April 11 letter also asserted that a non-accredited officer cannot be appointed as the Managing Director of Water and Sanitation Agency (WASA), a subsidiary of HDA.
The development comes almost five years after the Supreme Court ordered that non-accredited engineers (diploma holders) should not be given the posts of the accredited engineers (degree holders) and that they should also not be allowed to lead any sort of engineering projects.
“This is a first precedent in any development authority [in Sindh],” the secretary underlined, pointing out that the criteria decided by the HDA’s incumbent Director General Fuad Ghaffar Soomro, who is also Deputy Commissioner of Hyderabad, has been notified in the gazette by the Sindh government. He also referred to October 3, 2018, order of the apex court in this regard.
Nine officers of the HDA and WASA were promoted to BPS-20 and BPS-19 by the Departmental Promotion Committee (DPC) which met on March 28. These include six officers promoted to BPS-19 and three to BPS-20. However, only one official among them is a non-accredited engineer, Mirza Muhammad Ali Baig, whose rank has been upgraded to BPS-19.
Baig, in the capacity of general secretary of HDA Diploma Engineers Association, wrote a letter on April 11 to the HAD director general, arguing that the criteria set for the appointments was unjustified and needed to be reviewed.
Published in The Express Tribune, April 19th, 2023.
COMMENTS
Comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive.
For more information, please see our Comments FAQ