Federal government has decided to regularize the services
of the staff working on contractual basis in different public sector organizations. For this purpose, a Committee has also been formed to come up with a uniform regularization policy.
Indeed this is big news for the contractual staff working in different public sector organizations over the last many years as this will give them sense of security. We expect that the Committee entrusted with the responsibility will come up with such a policy that also ends the ad-hocism as this has severely affected the performance of the departments. In most of the cases, the contractual staff is hired by the organizations without following any procedure or merit. This is an injustice to the capable and competent candidates. Whilst we really appreciate the government for pondering over the regularization of the contractual staff but time has come that a proper mechanism is also pursued as in the case of the Central Superior Services (CSS) to ensure merit based regular recruitment at all levels in the public sector. This will also help the government greatly improve the performance of its departments which, in fact, have become redundant due to the policy of ad-hocism. Secondly, what the government needs to consider is also to provide better salary packages to its employees. There are certain organizations which are giving exorbitant salaries, incentives and bonuses to their employees whilst there are others whose employees are finding it difficult to meet both ends meet. This discrimination must also end. Apart from security services, there should be no discrepancy in the salaries of public sector departments. The salaried class is the most affected by the recent price hike but the government raised their salaries only by five to ten per cent in the current year budget. As the PTI Government is striving to improve governance and end corruption, the best way to do is to provide better salary packages to the employees. This should be made part of the civil service reforms currently being worked out by Adviser on Institutional Reforms Dr Ishrat Hussain.
