LAHORE, July 7: The provincial government is considering to making capability and not seniority or fitness as a basis for promotion of provincial management service officers.

Management and Professional Development Department (MPDD) minister Sardar Hasan Akhtar Moakkal told reporters here on Wednesday that he had objected to the earlier criteria for promotion in a meeting with Chief Minister Pervaiz Elahi.

The CM had assured him to give due consideration to his views and asked him to design some procedure for determining capability of officers, Mr Moakkal said, adding the department was arranging courses and examinations for the purpose.

Mr Elahi had so far linked promotion of BS-17 and -18 officers to training, he said. He said the chief minister had also agreed to his suggestion that the people trained by his department would be appointed only against the posts for which they had been trained.

Mr Moakkal said stress was also being laid on character building of the under-training officers by telling them that they had been employed for solving people's problems and not creating new ones.

Saying over 70 per cent ministers, MPAs and government officers were yet unaware about the nature of his department formed in 2002, he regretted that the ministers were not responding to repeated queries regarding professional needs of their departments.

Mr Moakkal, who strongly believed that most of the problems being faced by the country were due to mismanagement, hoped that his department would soon be able to provide skilled and professionally efficient administration to the province.

The MPDD was also looking for revenue generation through providing training to the private sector professionals as the law department was being consulted to know authority and jurisdiction of the MPDD, he said.

Mr Moakkal, a former deputy speaker of the Punjab Assembly, said a proposal for training of parliamentarians had also been submitted with the government. He sought a ban on training of officials abroad for saving precious foreign exchange and advocated diversion of funds to the MPDD for providing them facilities here.

But his department lacked statistics about how much funds had so far been consumed by the Punjab to forward their case on sound footing. Earlier, MPDD secretary Dr Liaquat Ali Niazi, who happens to be a class-mate of the minister, sought linking of all training institutions in the province to his department for bringing a cohesion in their performance.

He also stressed on linking the planning and development department with it so that the officials could be told that what (project) was professionally better. The department was also planning to construct its own hostel for officials coming from outstation for training. A summary had been moved to acquire an eight-kanal plot adjacent to the office building.

However, there was a private residence built over the land and Mr Moakkal vowed to raze it to the ground if somehow he found that it had been illegally built. So far a portion of the administrative block of the department had been converted into hostel for accommodating 37 guests.