VBHUBANESWAR: The State Government has directed secretaries of different departments and district collectors to withhold the salaries of 80 BDOs for their failure to validate service books of government employees.‘’The salaries of all the drawing and disbursing offices (DDOs), who were unable to complete the work of validation and authentication of service books by July 31, may be withheld and departmental proceedings initiated against them,’’ a circular from Chief Secretary BK Patnaik said. As many as 80 BDOs were found to be DDOs.The Government has issued several instructions to the DDOs during the last four years to digitise the service books of all of its employees. Of the 3,45,800 government staff, service books of 3.42 lakh have been computerised while 2.93 lakh service books have been validated. While enclosing a list of the defaulting DDOs, the Chief Secretary asked the department secretaries and district collectors to ensure that the Government order is complied with in time failing which action should be initiated against them.The Government initiated IT-enabled human resource management system (HRMS) in 2005 to address the grievances of its employees which consumed maximum manpower hours of senior officers given the nature of work. While the total number of government employees then was 4.7 lakh, over 50,000 cases were pending for disposal at various levels.Although the number of employees has come down to 3.45 lakh, the number of litigations is increasing every year. The Government is unable to address service matter related problems of its employees due to lack of a data-base on individual employees and the pensioners.While many retired persons are running from pillar to post to get their pensions, the other major problems faced by the government employees are non-submission of confidential character rolls (CCRs) in time, pending departmental proceedings, delay in promotion and preparation of gradation list in time.In the absence of an organised data-base of employees, the decision-making becomes slow as retrieval of accurate and relevant information is not easy. Even monitoring of employees’ work performance suffers. Although large-scale absenteeism is reported from rural and remote areas, the Government is unable to take action.Monitoring of the activities of the large number of field workers such as schoolteachers, anganwadi workers and health workers, which is so important for proper delivery of key public services, becomes cumbersome. Without an organised employee data-base many citizen-centric initiatives of the Government fail to yield the desired results, said a senior officer.
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