Only 12 regular Executive Officers for 54 municipal councils

Lalit Mohan

The government is planning to increase urban areas in the state. It has already made an announcement to upgrade Palampur from a municipal council to a municipal corporation. There is also the demand for the upgrade of the Solan municipal council to a corporation.

The Dharamsala Municipal Council was upgraded to a corporation in 2015 during the previous Congress government. With the upgrade, eight villages were merged with the corporation area and the total population rose from 22,000 to 50,000.

The Dharamsala Municipal Corporation had requested the government for 67 additional posts. The former Municipal Commissioner had written to the government in March last year, seeking 31 ministerial and engineering posts. However, till date nothing has happened on the front.

Most of the urban local bodies in the state are reeling under an acute shortage of staff that has paralyzed their functioning. There are 54 municipal councils in the state but there are just 12 regular Executive Officers to manage their affairs.

The government has delegated all administrative powers to the Executive Officers. Since more than 80 posts of Executive Officer are lying vacant, tehsildars have been given the administrative charge of the municipal councils. Since tehsildars generally remain busy in revenue work, they hardly have time for the works of the councils.

Amarjot Singh Bedi, president of Una Municipal Council, says that the government should either recruit new Executive Officers or promote officers from the municipal cadre to the posts. Till it is done, the government should delegate powers to the elected presidents of the councils for general administrative works. The failure of the government to post regular Executive Officers has paralyzed even regular functioning of the municipal councils, he adds.

Meanwhile, the government is thinking of promoting employees from the clerical cadre and from among sanitary inspectors of the councils as Executive Officers. Junior engineers serving in the councils have also urged the government to consider them for promotion, as they have the administrative experience of managing most of the works of the urban local bodies.

The municipal councils are also facing an acute shortage of engineering staff. There are just five posts of assistant engineer in the entire state to manage the works of 54 municipal councils. These five assistant engineers are posted in Chamba, Mandi, Solan and Kullu districts. There is no post of Assistant Municipal Engineer in Kangra district that has many important municipal councils of Kangra, Nurpur, Palampur and Baijnath. Only one junior engineer is handling the engineering work to clear maps of all municipal councils.

The junior engineers have their own problems. They say that there is total stagnancy in their cadre. No one in their cadre has been promoted in the past more than 20 years, says a junior engineer. He adds that many officers in their cadre are due to retire without even one promotion in their entire service period.

The urban local bodies were formed for rapid development in the state. For that generally the urban local bodies have to submit project proposals to the state government for financial grants. However, since the urban local bodies hardly have any staff, none of them submits proposals for development projects. In many local urban bodies, the employees go without salaries for months, as there are no permanent Executive Officers under whose signatures they are paid salaries.

Minister for Town and Country Planning Sarween Chaudhary says that the staff shortage problem in the urban local bodies is likely to be resolved soon.