KATHMANDU, Nov 24:The Health Ministry has come up with a guideline to regulate foreign trips of its employees after growing criticism from public that the government employees spend more time on foreign junket rather than in the office. 

The Ministry has developed the guidelines regarding a committee to select employees of the ministry and its subordinate bodies for foreign trips. The guidelines came into effect from Tuesday. 

When the important works have remained unaddressed with high-ranking officials spending over half a time in foreign trips, the Ministry came up with the tough policy measure to prevent the trend. 

In absence of specific guidelines regulating and managing foreign visits of Ministry employees, the wrong practice was propping up in the Ministry that resulted in seizure of foreign visit opportunities by a certain section. 

The Ministry introduced the policy to address the problems such as repeated opportunity of foreign trips to a single person, highhandedness of high ranking officials in grapping such chance and ignorance to relevant employees in sending them to foreign country, shared Ministry Spokesperson Bhogendra Dorel. 

He further informed, "The guidelines have given emphasis on employees of concerned group while nominating for foreign training, visit, workshop and seminar. It has set limitation on foreign visits allowing employees above 11th level to go to foreign trips for four times; 10th level for two times and below 10 for one time in a year". RSS