LAHORE, June 2: Officers of the APUG (All Pakistan Unified Group) will be given representation on the Punjab management service being introduced to overcome the existing problem of coordination and crisis-management at district level.

This was disclosed by official sources here on Sunday. They said legislation to give powers to officers of the new service would also be made in near future. This would enable them to perform certain amount of general management functions such as finance and planning, community development, human resource development, coordination and even revenue administration, they said.

The sources said the province had been facing coordination and crisis-management problems after the abolition of the offices of divisional commissioners, deputy commissioners and executive magistrates at the time of the introduction of district governments on August last year.

This had eliminated the role of the administration with regard to authorized coordination and general administration, breaking the backbone of the concept of administration. “Now, the new service will once again strengthen the administrative structure,” they hoped.

According to the sources, the APUG officers were likely to get a share in the provincial management service according to arrangements under the IPPC which allowed 25 per cent seats for those in BS-17, 40 per cent in BS-18, 50 per cent in BS-19, 60 per cent in BS-20 and 70 per cent in BS-21.

They said the new service which was approved by Governor Khalid Maqbool on May 24 had been proposed by a high-level committee which was given the task of redesignating ADO (revenue) as DDO revenue besides creating two new offices of EDO and DO at the district government level.

During the process, the committee headed by Additional Chief Secretary Mian Muhammad Jamil and comprising provincial services and regulations secretaries, realized that there were certain amount of general management functions which could not be performed by officers of professional services like forests and agriculture. And therefore a separate management service was required to be created.

These functions, the committee found, were being performed by generalists belonging to DMG, PCS and PSS and required to be formalized in one service especially in view of the fact that the civil secretariat and the field jobs had now become interchangeable because of the existence of independent secretariats in every district.

According to the decision, the ex-PCS and ex-PSS (secretariat service) have been merged into the new service and their officers will be inducted at different level.

Meanwhile, the official sources said the new posts of EDO, DO and DDO would represent each department working at the district and tehsil levels.

The team of officers would be headed by an EDO at district level, having different DDOs at tehsil level. One of the DDOs would be appointed coordinator to have a liaison with his colleagues representing all departments, they said.