Finance Minister Pradip Kumar Amat on Friday said that his department created as many as 2.4 lakh new posts for efficient functioning of the Government in last 10 years amid criticism of the Opposition Congress and BJP that the State Government was not taking any initiative to fill up lakhs of posts lying vacant in various Government departments.
Replying to a debate in the Assembly on the admissibility of an adjournment motion on the issue, Amat described the Opposition allegation as ‘baseless’.
Amat, however, justified the non filling of the posts on grounds of enforcing fiscal discipline and saving the State from recurring over draft.
He said during the last ten years, the Finance Department had given permission to fill up over 2.4 lakh posts and create several new posts. However, despite the Government permission, many posts were lying vacant due to various court cases, he pointed out.
The Minister said during the last ten years, more than 14,000 recruitments were made in the Home Department, 4,000 in the Revenue, 1,540 in the Higher Education and 5,892 in the School and Mass Education departments.
The Chief Minister has also recently ordered to fill up essential posts within the next six months, he revealed.
He further said the Government had enhanced the retirement age of the Government employees from 58 to 60 years so that there would be no vacancies during the next two years due to retirement.
The Minister clarified that the restriction on new recruitment was made as in 1999 the then Congress Government had signed an agreement with the Centre to reduce the number of employees by 10 per cent for maintaining fiscal discipline.
Instruction was given to abolish 50 per cent of the sanctioned posts lying vacant from July 1999 to March 2001 and 75 per cent of the sanctioned posts lying vacant till April 2004.
Under this process 44,413 sanctioned posts were abolished which were not necessary, he said. However, since 2008 no sanctioned posts were being abolished, he said.
Participating in the debate, Opposition members alleged that the posts were lying vacant in almost all the departments including some key departments like Health and Family Welfare, School and Mass Education, Home, Works and Higher Education. People suffered as there were no doctors in many hospitals, students’ education hampered and construction work could not make much headway due to large scale vacancies, they said.