LAHORE, Aug 21: Anomalies in the service structure of the local bodies are not only creating unrest among their employees but also hampering flow of official work, official sources claimed on Sunday.

They said the Punjab government had recently notified rules for the tehsil/town municipal administrations, but these were faulty and framed in contravention of the recent amendment to the Local Government Ordinance which makes it obligatory for all provinces to create local government service of all cadres by Dec 31, 2005.

“What Punjab has done instead is to place officials from BS-1 to 16 under the TMAs,” the sources alleged.

They said the provincial government, too, was framing rules for the district government service without counselling the stakeholders. “We fear that these (rules) would be imposed on the district governments,” they said.

Pointing out certain flaws in the service arrangements of the local bodies, the sources said under the Local Government Ordinance, the Public Health Engineering Department and the Local Council Service and Local Government Department were to be devolved to the local governments.

But what actually happened was that the government partially devolved the PHED. Officers and officials from BS-1 to 16 were placed under the command of districts while those of higher grades continued to work in districts under the provincial department.

By doing so the government created dual public health engineering departments at the district level, one functioning under the district administration and another under the provincial department.

The officers in BS-17 and above working in districts but under the command of the provincial department were handling mega projects in districts without the consent of the latter. They were supposed to hand over the completed projects to the district or tehsil councils.

But in many cases the tehsil administrations had refused to take over the projects. One example was stated to be that of Gujranwala whose district nazim reportedly refused to take over a Rs200 million project executed by the provincial set up of the department in the district.

The employees of the local council service, who were recruited through the Punjab Public Service were to be posted district officers community organization but they were sent to the tehsil administration.

The step made the officers happy but created a hurdle in the way of Citizen Community Boards (CCBs), which were one of the major components of the overall devolution plan in the country.

They said another anomaly was that the union council secretaries appointed under the Local Government Ordinance of 1979 were placed under the union councils without any service rules. Since the union councils of the existing local government system have three secretaries instead of the previous one, there still exists a large number of vacant posts despite the additional appointment of hundreds of octroi inspectors against the post.

Officials said the secretaries had approached the high court for a decision about their future service prospects. The court directed the local government to take a decision in this respect but the matter was still lingering on.

“And you can imagine the amount of uncertainty among these employees who have been deputed to run the third and basic tier of the local bodies,” they said.