Being the central departmental offices, established in the Sindh Secretariat, the offices of the Directorate of Industries and Forest Department are in a poor condition and need immediate renovation. The miserable condition of the said offices is causing hardships for the officials working there, as well as for the visitors, it is learnt.
However, the offices of secretary wildlife and industries’ director are in a better condition with all facilities, including proper furniture, air-conditioning and carpets, while the wildlife department was facing shortage of staff, investigation by Pakistan Today revealed.
An official of the forest department said there were only three section officers (SOs) in his department adjusted with the other junior staff in the same room, with only an artificial partition separating them from the junior staff. He also showed this scribe cracks in the roofs of the building, which could lead to tragedy at any given time.
According to the rule, he said each SO was supposed to get a separate staff with all basic facilities, but they were yet to get such facilities. He said that for the government officials, an impression was being created that the posting of officials in the forest department was punishment for the officials transferred there. The department had a generator that went out of order months back, thus compelling officials to work without electricity incase of power outages.
He further said the government apathy could be gauged by the fact that precious record files of the department were lying in a random manner in the corridors of the building and on top of shelves. He also said the doors and windows of all offices were broken and needed immediate replacement as winter was just around the corner. Furthermore, he said they had only one telephone number for the office.
He said they had one peon due to which they could not entertain the visiting officials and guests. Recently, all the offices of the provincial finance department have gone through proper renovation and they were provided with all new facilities. He said the chief high ups should take serious notice of the persisting situation and take measures to facilitate the officers so they could perform their duties in a better manner.
The officials at the directorate of industries also spoke about the same problems. They said the directorate had been placed at the end of the barrack and the officials had imposed ban on entry of vehicles, thus causing serious hardship for the staff. They said if a grade-19 official had to reach a place incase of emergency meeting, the officials had to walk at least 20 minutes to get to their vehicles, which were parked randomly on roads.
The officials were of the view that if the government feared any terrorist activity, then it should issue special stickers to official above grade-16 so that their dignity could remain intact.
