SRO killing prospects of promotions for other civil service groups

ISLAMABAD: The Statutory Regulatory Order (SRO) is diminishing the prospects of promotions of other civil service groups, it has been observed by Pakistan Today.

The SRO 2014 was prepared by certain individuals of Pakistan Administrative Service (PAS), previously known as DMG, in order to establish its hegemony in all affairs of the federal and provincial governments.

They had set a post sharing formula with the civil service group, especially the Secretariat group and Provincial Management Service.

Under this, the incumbent government with the support of a few officers of PAS had given 65 per cent seats of grade 22 to the power group of bureaucracy, whereas, the remaining were distributed among the 11 groups of the civil services.

The Federal Secretariat was for the Secretariat Group, who had a major share in the posts of deputy secretary, joint secretary and senior joint secretary, while the posts of additional secretary and federal secretary were divided amongst all groups, including the then DMG and the Secretariat Group.

Officers said that presently, most of the federal, as well as, provincial departments’ secretaries’ seats were occupied by PAS officers.

Surprisingly, the PAS group wanted to retain that seat which was truly a technical seat like that of the Auditor General of Pakistan.

In addition to this, the chief secretary (CS) posts were specifically allocated to PAS under this SRO.

The officers further said that CS posts belonged to the Secretariat cadre but now all posts had gone to PAS, which was an injustice to the other group officers. Earlier, OMG officer Imtiaz Masroor remained Punjab chief secretary.

The post of senior joint secretary was specially created for the Secretariat Group, however, all the senior joint secretary posts were given to PAS in a prejudiced moved.

Moreover, PAS had also changed its nomenclature from DMG to PAS just to grab secretariat posts, the officers claimed.

In addition to this, PAS officers always did injustice with the Provincial Civil Servants by violating their quotas. The DMG officers were sent to the provinces for posting against the posts of ACs, DCs and commissioners, while the posts of provincial DS, AS and secretaries were posts for PCS Secretariat cadre. Officers of PCS claimed that most of the posts of provincial secretaries were occupied by PAS officers.

Presently, PAS officers were serving as secretaries in 41 out of 44 different departments of Punjab and only three officers were from PCS, namely Naseem Sadiq, Chaudry Ijaz Khalid and Muhammad Sadiq.

Moreover, out of nine divisions, eight commissioners belonged to PAS and only one commissioner belonged to PCS.

In addition to this, around 21 posts of commissioners in Punjab in 36 districts belonged to DMG. On the other hand, only 15 officers were from PCS.

The officers disclosed that the junior officers of PAS were serving on grade 21 divisional commissioner seats. The officers were Momin Agha (Faisalabad), Saqib Zafar (Bahawalpur), Nadeem Aslam Chaudry (Rawalpindi), Bilal Ahmed Butt (Multan), Nadeem Mehmood (Sargodha), and Abdullah Sunbal (Lahore) were grade 20 officers, and Ali Bahadar Qazi (Sahiwal) was a grade 19 officer but were serving on grade 21 posts.

Moreover, officers said that this SRO was against the constitution as it did not give equality to everyone. “If we have one service group then there is no problem, but we have 11 other groups due to which the government is bound to provide equal rights to every officer,” he added.

Officers share this point of view that PAS was doing an injustice to the Provincial Civil Services. The allocation of SJS posts to PAS was ending the career of other group officers in grade 20 or 21.

No one in the Establishment Division, including the Establishment secretary, gave the response on this matter despite repeated attempts to reach them on their private numbers.