MULTAN City News

Punjab Prisons Department
Direct recruitment limits PPSC inductees’ growth
From Nadeem Shah
MULTAN: Serious irregularities have been detected in the direct recruitment on the posts of superintendent and deputy superintendent in the Punjab Prisons Department, it is learnt reliably.
The officials with shoulder promotion are the only beneficiaries of the Prisons Department’s promotion policy which have darkened the future of those graduate and postgraduate officers who were recruited through Punjab Public Service Commission (PPSC) on merit, sources said. The Prisons Department is handling the most dangerous terrorists in jails across the province but working on ad-hocism and stopgap arrangements by running the system through officiating charge on executive posts.
Sources confided to The News that 59 out of a total of 121 executive officers in BPS-17 are working on shoulder promotion in Punjab’s jails. The Prison Department staffers have rejected the claim that 14 seats - eight under direct quota and six by promotion quota - were available from 2006 to 2010. They said the department was misleading the people over the issue because there was no quota available during the abovementioned period - a fact that could confirmed from the official record.
While highlighting the discriminatory policy, insiders say 47 seats of deputy superintendents (BPS-17) are currently vacant against the sanctioned strength of 100, but the PPSC-recruited assistant superintendents have not been provided opportunity of promotion to BPS-17. The remaining 53 seats of deputy superintendents are occupied by 32 regular deputy and 21 assistant superintendents working on shoulder promotion. The insiders say the promotion to the rank of deputy superintendent requires a three-month course but the Prisons Department bosses did not prefer sending the PPSC-recruited assistant superintendents for training, creating a room for promoting the rankers only.
The directly recruited officers have been occupying 40 posts of BPS-18 out of 57 seats and the discriminatory policy has rendered only 5 per cent share to the officers recruited through PPSC. The situation had created unrest among the employees recruited on merit, the sources in Prisons Department disclosed, as all the graduate, post-graduate assistant superintendents would have to wait 20-25 years for promotion compared to directly recruited officers, were getting three to four promotions in the same period, they said.
The Prisons Department sources say currently, IG Prisons (BPS 21), six DIG Prisons (BPS 20), eight AIG and senior superintendents (BPS 19), 23 superintendents (BPS 18) and 26 deputy superintendents (BPS 17) are working on shoulder promotion, which is almost 70 per cent of the executive posts, for the last five to eight years.
They said IG Prisons Mian Farooq Nazir was in BPS 20 but working on a BPS 21 post under shoulder promotion for the last three years. Similarly, the post of DIG was of BPS-20, but six DIGs of BPS-19 had been occupying the slot for the last two to eight years under shoulder promotion, including Mian Salak Jalal (8 years), Mirza Shahid Salim Baig (6 years), Mubasher Ahmed Khan (5 years), Abdul Rauf Rana (4 years), Shaukat Feroze (4 years) and Naveed Rauf (2 years), they added. Also, 16 posts of senior superintendent and AIG jails in BPS-19 are sanctioned and six lucky officers of BPS 19 with shoulder promotion are working on BPS-20 post for the last 2-5 years purely on political grounds.
The department had planned establishment of Prisons College in Sahiwal to provide training to cadres for promotion, but the institution could not be started launched so far. The majority of officers have been deprived of promotion after failing to qualify mandatory promotion courses. Only 34 out of 484 executive officers have completed promotion courses in the last five to eight years in various institutions.
The shoulder promotion was against the rules and regulations and a violation of SC orders, the insiders said. The Punjab Prisons Department sources said the discriminatory policy was against the provincial government’s transparency drive as the department’s bosses had darkened the career of highly educated assistant superintendent.
On the other hand, the directly-appointed assistant superintendents say the Prisons Department had decided to give promotion to the rankers, just to punish them over filing a petition in the Lahore High Court for their promotion. The petitioners are of the view that this step has been planned to fill all the vacant seats of deputy superintendent before the court decision. IG Prison Farooq Nazir was repeatedly contacted on his cell phone but he did not respond to this scribe. Text messages were also sent to him to get his version but he did not bother to reply.