Over 2,200 agriculture posts to be scrapped in Punjab
Vishav Bharti
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, January 28
Though the state government is making all kind of claims about providing ‘ghar ghar rozgar’, in reality it seems to be hell-bent on snatching away jobs from the public. The government has decided to abolish more than 2,200 posts in the Agriculture Department.
As per a restructuring report of the department presented before a committee headed by the Chief Secretary recently, it has been decided that of the total 5,400 sanctioned posts, over 2,200 will be abolished.
Now, the government has sent a report to the Personnel Department for implementing the report.
As per the report, the brunt of this decision will borne by the Group-D employees, where all 1,748 sanctioned posts will be abolished. It will be followed by Group-C posts, where 384 of 1,736 sanctioned posts will be abolished. Similarly, Group-B has 427 sanctioned posts, of them 110 will be abolished. Interestingly, even 17 posts of Group-A are being abolished. It means over 41 per cent posts of the department will be abolished.
For administrative functioning, the Agriculture Department is divided into four wings — administrative, statistics, engineering and hydrology. Not just non-technical posts, a large number of technical posts will also be abolished. The worst sufferer will be the hydrology wing, which will be shutdown completely. The engineering and statistics wings will also be the main sufferers.
There are total 149 sanctioned posts of the engineering wing, of which 112 (75 per cent) have been proposed to be abolished. Similarly, the statistics wing has total 153 sanctioned posts, of which 50 (33 per cent) will be abolished. However, none of the 2,175 technical posts of the administrative wing will be touched.
Jaswant Singh, member, Joint Action Committee, Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare Department, called it discrimination with their cadre at the behest of the administrative wing. In a letter written to the CM, the joint committee of the three wings — statistics, engineering and hydrology — said the government had ignored the priorities andwelfare of farmers under the influence of the administrative wing.
Meanwhile, Agriculture Secretary KS Pannu said, “Abolishing Group-D posts is part of the government policy for many years. As far as the technical posts are concerned, we have done some restructuring as per the present day requirements.”
