Two-tier system zonal: Karnataka government confines employees to one district.
Hyderabad: The two-tier system zonal cadre system proposed by the state government confines employees to one district. In the current three-tier system, they can be transferred to four to five districts.
The state government in its draft guidelines has proposed to bring zonal cadre employees into district cadre.
After the reorganisation, each district has 30 to 40 mandals, as against 60 to 70 earlier. In the three-tier system, zonal cadre employees could be transferred to 250 to 300 mandals, that number now comes down.
Earlier, the state government had amended the MCH Act to enable the transfer of employees of the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation and the urban development department to the districts. Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao had openly said the reason for increasing corruption in the GHMC was because the government was not able to transfer them to the districts, and that they had to be rotated between different GHMC circles.
Now, while GHMC employees can be transferred to the districts, zonal cadre employees will be restricted to one district.
The zonal level posts have employees in different cadres. For example in the irrigation department the superintendent engineers are zonal cadre while in the health and medical department senior accountants are in the zonal cadre.
According to TS employees’ associations, there are about 3 lakh employees of whom half are teachers and about 50,000 are in zonal cadre. A senior officer said that after the two-tier system comes into effect, zonal cadre employees have to retire in the same district.
Telangana Non-Gazetted Employees Association president Karam Ravinder Reddy said that in the districts the government would have to create new posts to accommodate zonal cadre employees in the district cadre. He said that in some districts there were no zonal cadre posts in some departments.
He welcomed the two-tier system and said the association had asked the government to make all recruitment of staff at the district level, and promotions should be given with the state as a unit.
President order will need changing
As a part of scrapping the three-tier zonal system, the state government has sent draft guidelines to all departments on adjustment of employees into the proposed two-tier system.
TS Chief Secretary S.P. Singh met with special chief secretaries, principal secretaries and secretaries and discussed about the formulation of the new Presidential Order with a two-tier system.
The government circulated draft guidelines on the existing and proposed systems to fit the employees of various cadres into the two-tier system.
According to the draft proposals, lower division clerks and those ranked below them belong to the district cadre. In the new system all non-gazetted posts will be brought under district cadre.
Non-gazetted employees of multi-zone cadres will be brought into district cadre and all gazetted posts will be brought into the state cadre. The specified gazetted posts listed in the Third Schedule will be brought under the state cadre.
The state level will include all the existing posts and all gazetted categories. In Hyderabad, 14 departments listed in GSR 528 (E) will likely continue as they are.
The state government has directed all secretaries to furnish the details of employees of all categories of posts in the heads of the department offices in their respective departments. The government directed the secretaries to hold meetings with their heads of he departments and finalise the recommendations for the formulation of proposed new Presidential Order.
