Misplaced: ‘Deputationists’ cause anxiety among senior civil servants

In defiance of Supreme Court orders, officers on deputation are being retained


Zahid Gishkori November 07, 2014

ISLAMABAD:


The government continues to retain officers on deputation, defying the apex court’s order which clearly states that non-civil servants cannot serve on deputation. Most of them are professionals who do not have required expertise of the affairs they are dealing with, officials at the Establishment Division (ED) revealed on Wednesday.


As many as 414 officers on deputation are in service in various federal government departments, revealed official figures. They are teachers, judges, military officers, intelligence personnel, police officers, engineers and doctors, and a majority of them have already completed the tenure of their service as many of them had been appointed during the tenure of the last PPP-led government.

Close to a hundred officers are defying the apex court’s order, said a senior officer who prepared these figures, on condition of anonymity. The officer expressed concern and questioned as to how these officers were working on general posts in federal ministries when they can only, supposedly, serve in their parent departments. The ED is unable to use section 10 of the Civil Servants Act 1973 as these deputationists have been appointed on political basis, he added. “This issue of deputationists has created unrest among many senior civil servants,” he said.

ED spokesperson, Dr Masood Akhter, explained the issue by recalling the Supreme Court’s judgment CRL-89-2013 which clearly stated that “non-civil servants cannot serve on deputation basis.”

As many as 261 of 414 are cadre/ex-cadre officers working against posts of section officers on deputation basis in the federal secretariat. More than 223 officers have been taken from Punjab, while around 70 were brought from Balochistan, 27 from Sindh and the rest from the federal government, Khyber-Pakhtunkhawa, Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan.

Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) took up this issue in the National Assembly last month, and asked the government to repatriate these officers to parent departments. “The government should discourage deputationists. This trend has marred good governance,” said MNA Sahibzada Tariqullah of JI.

The list reveals that Mufti Afzal, a senior officer in Inter Services Intelligence, is serving on deputation in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Capt (retd) Amjad Rauf, an officer in the Intelligence Bureau, is working in the Ministry of Water and Power. Numerous examples shed more light in how these workers on deputation are placed in departments they have no experience or training of working in. For example, many schoolteachers and lecturers are working on the posts of section officers.

Last year, some officers of the Office Management Group (OMG) of civil services, also filed a petition against deputationists for their repatriation.  They argued with examples that some officers have served on deputations for extended periods and were later absorbed in federal departments under the policy guidelines of the ED.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 7th, 2014.

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