The Ministry of General Administration (MoGA) and the Ministry of Local Development (MoLD) have jointly started work in this connection following a recent government decision on posting such officers to the VDC offices, said Bishnu Nath Sharma, spokesperson at MoLD.
However, trade unions are opposed to the move, saying it "humiliates" automatically promoted officials.
Sharma said that MoLD, in collaboration with MoGA, is now working on the size of VDC offices to be led by section officers. He said VDCs that are large in terms of population and resource mobilization and are adjacent to district headquarters will have section officers.
Officials at the Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers (PMO) said that a recent cabinet meeting took the decision to send automatically promoted officers to the VDC offices in a bid to provide a new role to these officers who have not been given responsibility matching their rank.
Under the same decision, the government is also posting automatically promoted under secretaries to the 52 Integrated Administrative Service Centers to be established in 48 districts.
In a controversial move in 2007, the government had automatically promoted over 13,000 officers on the basis of work experience, performance and academic qualifications through an amendment to the Civil Service Act to please government employee trade unions that assisted the political parties during the king´s direct rule in 2005 and in the Jana Andolan II in 2006.
The government decision on giving a new role to automatically promoted officers has, however, caused dissatisfaction among trade unions. They said the decision, if implemented, would humiliate such officials.
"We are against such a discriminatory decision," said Ganesh Basyal, chairperson of Nepal Government Employees Organization, one of the major government employee trade unions.
Basyal maintained that the government´s failure to assign responsibilities to officials even two years after their promotion and the latest decision to send such officials to VDC offices constitute a discrimination against the automatically promoted officials.
Even officials at the PMO said the government decision on the automatically promoted officials would be difficult to implement. "How can gazzetted third class (section officers) go to far-flung VDCs run by clerk-level secretaries who also are reluctant to work at those offices due to security fears?" asked a high ranking officer at the PMO.
kiran@myrepublica.com
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