Govt to recruit 50,000

In a bid to overcome shortage of staff in the departments manning emergency services in the State, the Government planned to recruit over 50,000 casual staff. The Government is working out a roadmap for the recruitment and the process would start as soon as the selection process was approved.

The Government Departments, which have been identified so far for engagement of casual staff, included Power, Public Health Engineering (PHE), Irrigation and Flood Control, Health and Medical Education, Education, Rural and Urban Development.

Some other Departments could also be incorporated in the list at the later stage, official sources said.

The Government is earmarking the Department wise posts.

Sources said the Government has taken a decision in principle to appoint over 50,000 casual staff in the Department, rendering emergency services to the people following reports by the authorities at the helm of affairs that they were facing acute shortage of staff in manning the services.

After a long drawn exercise, the Government has decided to overcome shortage of staff to provide emergency services to the people uninterruptedly by recruiting 50,000 casual staff.

Initially, it had been decided that Heads of the Departments in consultations with the Ministers would appoint the casual staff. However, the Opposition MLAs resented the proposal on the ground that it would lead to "pick and choose’’ policy by the Government.

The Government was now working on a new proposal for recruitment of casual staff. A Ministerial panel was holding consultations with the officials to work out a system to recruit casual staff without involving Services Selection Recruitment Board (SSRB) or any other recruitment agency.

Authorities were of the view that process to recruit casual staff can’t be handed over to a recruitment agency. More over, the agency could take a lot of time to recruit the staff while the Government wants immediate deployment of the staff to run the emergency services, sources said.

The emergency staff is proposed to be recruited on Rs 125 per day basis, a rate being paid to daily rated workers in different departments of the Government. The Government from Rs 110 recently revised the rates of daily rated workers per day to Rs 125 per day.

The Government was yet to take a decision on whether the casual labourers would be absorbed permanently in the jobs after seven years or not.

"An exercise is underway to work out all modalities of recruitment of casual staff. As soon as the modalities are finalized, the Government would start the recruitment process’’, sources said, adding the authorities were confident that the emergency services would start running smoothly to quite an extent with the recruitment of over 50,000 casual staff.