Desperate rush to recruit thousands en masse

ISLAMABAD: The PPP government has regularised the services of almost 100,000 temporary employees including daily wagers and contract appointees, besides reinstating thousands of those sacked in the past for their irregular appointments during Benazir Bhutto’s second tenure.
On top of these controversial hirings and regularisation of temporary appointees, the government has also launched a hiring process for more than 20,000 positions at the federal level just a few months before the general elections.
The Interior Ministry alone has just advertised what it claimed 8,816 vacant posts for recruitment in the ministry and its attached departments, subordinate offices, law enforcement agencies and civil armed forces.
Meanwhile, the Establishment Division sources confided to The News that almost 100,000 daily wagers and temporary appointees, mostly recruited during the present regime, had been regularised on the recommendation of the senior PPP minister Khursheed Shah-led committee.
This all happened despite the recent Supreme Court’s order to freeze new hiring in the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA). The SC has also sought from the PIA management to present details of all the hirings made so far while hearing a case about corruption at the national flag carrier.
Like several other state entities, the loss-making highly-overstaffed PIA has been stuffed with thousands of new recruits by the present government. It is said that only in the PIA, more than 2,000 employees were recruited during the tenure of the present government without giving a serious thought to the fact that bloated bureaucracy has been a major factor in the failure of state institutions like the PIA, Railways and Pakistan Steel Mills.
According to media reports, the number of people hired by the regime in the PIA is believed to be the highest in the history of the national flag carrier, with most people –1,179 – having been employed in 2010. Despite making losses, the PIA

recruited 237 people in 2011, 1,179 in 2010, while 684 appointments were made in 2009 and 56 in 2008. Around 1,854 of these appointments were made on regular footing while 317 employees were recruited on a contract basis.
A government spokesman, when approached, said that regularisation of temporary appointees was the consequence of policy decision taken by the federal cabinet a few months back. Similarly, it is said that the reinstatement of sacked employees of the Benazir Bhutto’s second regime was also the result of government’s policy decision taken in 2008.
According to the Establishment Division sources, around 40,000 temporary employees have been regularised ever since the division was involved in the process whereas the services of almost 50,000 to 60,000 temporary appointees were regularised by the government before engaging the ED in this exercise.
A special wing constituted in the Establishment Division is working directly under Federal Minister and senior PPP leader, Syed Khurshid Shah, to execute and monitor the regularisation of contract appointees in the federal secretariat and its attached departments and corporations.
Necessary instructions were issued to all the ministries and departments concerned for early implementation of the government’s decision to regularise the services of contractual appointees, including daily wagers and contingent staff.
In addition to the regularisation of these temporary employees, most of the 7,000 employees, who were dismissed in the late 1990s for having been appointed without due process of law and on political considerations during Benazir Bhutto’s second term, have also been reappointed following the cabinet decision of the PPP regime under Gilani’s premiership.
Only recently, Prime Minister Pervaiz Ashraf approved a comprehensive plan to offer 22,000 new jobs in lucrative and politically-important departments by relaxing the ban on recruitments in the Frontier Constabulary, Pakistan Rangers, Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), Motorway Police, Federal Board of Revenue, Benazir Income Support Programme, Pakistan Bait-ul Mal, Utility Stores Corporation (USC) and such other institutions.