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| June 24, 2006 | Saturday | Jumadi-ul-Awwal 27, 1427 |
Concern over incentives for non-Baloch officials
KARACHI, June 23: A package designed by the Establishment Division to motivate officials of Punjab, Sindh and NWFP origin to serve in Balochistan is causing a lot of resentment in the provincial services cadre and the Balochistan government is under severe pressure to reject it.
Under the package, officers of All Pakistan Unified Services (APUS) — police, district management group etc. — have been offered a straight one grade promotion on transfer to Balochistan. The monetary benefit is an extra allowance of 50 per cent of salary.
The Balochistan government will be required to give such officials and members of their families three air tickets a year to visit their home district in any of the three provinces.
The provincial government received Establishment Division’s communication about a week ago but it has so far kept quiet on the issue. But the information was leaked out by some top bureaucrats and its implications are being discussed in whispers among politicians and civil servants.
“We appreciate the concern being shown by the Establishment Division to give our province able administrators”, a well-placed government source remarked, while confirming the communication from Islamabad.
“But look at its cost”, he said. The cost is its political fallout and an additional financial burden on a province that is in budgetary deficit for the second consecutive year.
He said that the Establishment Division’s package gave APUS officials of other provinces an elite status that was bound to demoralise the provincial services cadre in Balochistan.
A few dozen elite officers will be supervising a demoralised and frustrated workforce at different levels.
According to the government source, the message of the proposal was that “Balochistan is not capable of giving good administrators and civil servants”. A senior official in Balochistan secretariat said he wondered why their province was being singled out for all sorts of ‘novel schemes.’
One explanation in support of the package is that the government is doing away with the levies which is being merged into police force which would need competent officers. And the authors of the proposal believe that good and competent officers can come from the three other provinces.
“Theft and all sorts of crimes are being reported from areas where levies are being replaced by police,” a journalist informed Balochistan’s Finance Minister Syed Ehsan Shah during his post- budget press conference on Wednesday. “Those in levies are mostly loyal of the local sardars and waderas,” the minister replied.
The provincial government has not taken a position on the issue so far, but sources say it is bound to figure in the budget debate in the assembly.
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