LAHORE, Nov 1: Thousands of officials of provincial departments marked for devolution up to union council level will soon be terminated from their services as no vacancies have been left to accommodate them, it is learnt.

Sources close to the authorities concerned claim that the termination process will be initiated after Dec 31, 2001, in the name of “rationalization” of the staff.

Most of the staff of housing and physical planning, local government and rural development and public health engineering departments have been accommodated in tehsil councils, the sources say. But these councils are not ready to accept “more than the required staff” as under the devolution plan district/tehsil councils will be responsible to pay salaries and fringe benefits to these officials, they say. These councils have refused to accept all this staff as they do not want to put an extra burden on their budgets.

The sources say some LG&RD officials have been posted in the community development department of district governments as under the old local bodies system they had been performing this function satisfactorily, though under the law they were not required to do so. But the social welfare department authorities objected to these postings, and insisted that social welfare officials should be posted instead as under the rules they were authorized to undertake community development, they say.

Officials of the local council service (employees of civic bodies) have been completely ignored in this scenario though they are the most competent to run the local bodies on the basis of their years-long experience in the earlier system. The people, especially those who have captured key posts in the new system, have no experience of running the local councils as many of them are engineers (from PHED), architect (from housing and physical planning department), etc. and have earlier been doing some technical jobs in their respective departments.

The sources say most of the postings made on Aug 22 last to run the district government system from top to bottom were without any merit and totally ignoring the qualification of the official concerned. Now the authorities have put a ban on further transfers and postings to rectify the “follies” committed during the first phase of postings, they say.

According to them, in many cases junior officers of grade 16 to 17 have been posted at senior posts, while the officers of grade 18 and 19 have been made their subordinates. In Shalimar Town, Lahore, a grade-17 officer has been posted as tehsil municipal officer, while a grade-19 officer has been made his subordinate by posting him as tehsil officer, they claim.

Meanwhile, the process of posting of union council staff has been completed in Lahore. There were about 800-strong staff at the disposal of the authorities for posting in 150 union councils of the city government. Out of them, 750 employees have so far been posted — three secretaries, one naib qasid and one night watchman for each union council.

One of the three secretaries will handle municipal affairs, the other will be responsible for issuing birth/death certificate and act as cashier of the union council, while the third will maintain necessary record like minutes of the meetings of the union council and of reconciliatory councils, etc.