NC Staff Side suggestion on Classification of Posts
Except the 2nd CPC, all other earlier Commissions had recommended for the retention of the four Groups of classifications.
The 2nd Pay Commission was of the opinion that the grouping of Central Government employees into four categories served no practical purpose. Rather, they commented that it had only created an unhealthy psychological effect.
The 4th CPC therefore suggested for abandoning the classification of civil servants in 4 groups. They had examined the practice followed by other countries including those with a large and complex civil service, where it had not been found necessary to super impose upon their civil service grade and occupational groups.
During the last six and half decades, our country has moved quite far away from the colonial system of governance in substance and form.
The 3rd CPC justified the grouping on an assumed equivalence of the work content in different levels of the various occupational groups.
Over the years, changes in the scale of pay of many grade and cadres have taken place, even though there had been no change in the value or level of responsibility of the assigned jobs.
Despite having no such addition to the level of responsibility to assigned jobs, the grades had to move from one group to another, because of the pay scale based grouping.
It is the view of he Department of Personnel on classification that has ultimately survived. It may not be out of place to mention that the service condition of Government employees are still governed by the rules enunciated, whether country was a British Colony.
Despite the specific provision in the constitution (Article 309) making it incumbent upon the parliament to enact the legislation to govern the service conditions of civil servants the fact remains that no Government which took over the reins of governance in the country could find time to introduce a Bill in the parliament for that purpose.
It is not therefore surprising that the DOPT stuck to the conservative position of maintaining the status quo.
The four grouping which presently refers the classification, we must sadly state has taken the shape and content of “varnashram”.
In almost all the PSUs, the classification is “Executive and Non Executives”. In our opinion all cadres, which were characterized as “Gazetted” in 1960’s may be placed in the Group of Executive and the rest in non-executive.
We, therefore, request the 7th CPC to make recommendation on classification of posts on the basis suggested by us.
Leave a Reply