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| October 1, 2005 | Saturday | Sha'aban 26, 1426 |
Wildlife directorate to get back its personnel
PESHAWAR, Sept 30: After working with district governments for four years since the August 2001 introduction of the devolution of power plan, the services of over 65 employees will be transferred back to the wildlife directorate.
The employees will report back to the directorate in line with a recent decision of the provincial government.
The decision, according to official sources, has been taken to make better use of these workers as they had been performing tasks incompatible with their previous work experience.
The services of more than 65 employees, most of them trained wildlife watchers, had been transferred from the directorate to district governments in line with the devolution of power plan under which all departments and their attached entities were restructured.
Even the directorate of wildlife, whose functions have not been devolved to the districts for not falling under the purview of the devolution plan, had experienced a major cut in its strength under the previous government’s restructuring plan.
Over 135 employees of the directorate had been removed in line with the then military-backed civil government’s policy of ‘right-sizing’ provincial public sector entities.
Of them over 70 were declared surplus by the provincial government which had created a “surplus employees’ pool” in an effort to trim the size of its establishment - as was required by some of the international donor agencies.
Similarly, services of more than 65 employees were distributed among the district governments - even though there was no plan to devolve the directorate of wildlife.
The devolution of power plan, according to sources, does not ask for devolving the functions of the directorate of wildlife, thus, none of the provinces touched the wildlife sector as far as devolving their functions was concerned.
“Cuts in the number of employees led to undermine the functioning of the directorate after it lost services of more than 100 trained wildlife watchers, bringing down its total strength to slightly over 250 from the previous strength of about 400 staffers,” said a well-placed official of the NWFP environment department, the parent department of the wildlife.
According to official sources, in an effort to rectify the situation a request to the effect of withdrawing the employees from the districts and placing them with the directorate was under consideration of the sitting government for quite some time.
Officials said that the decision to the effect of withdrawing the staff from the districts was recently taken. The move of placing surplus staff back to the directorate had also been agreed to in principle by the government.
“Though it amounts to deviating from the right-sizing policy, the move has been necessitated to rectify the situation as employees who had been imparted six months’ training course of wildlife watchers were performing as peons, sweepers and naib-qasids,” said an official.
As district governments, said the official sources, did not deal with the wildlife sector, the staff put at their disposal was of no use to them.
“Our trained wildlife watchers were being used as peons,” confirmed an employee of the wildlife directorate, when contacted. Officials said that the government was also considering withdrawing employees who had been put in the pool of surplus servicemen and placing them back with the directorate.
“They [employees declared surplus] are receiving salaries without doing anything, so the government may give them back to their department,” said the official.
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