Mp Planning To Abolish 60,000 Posts
The Madhya Pradesh government has decided to undertake a series of measures including downsizing of government as well as stalling fresh recruitments in order to restore the financial health of the state.
The government has already identified certain posts that can be abolished after the retirement of the current officials. So far, 60,000 such posts have been
identified.
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Chief Minister Digvijay Singh, after series of meetings with cabinet colleagues and senior bureaucrats, has decided to rigorously enforce economy measures to improve the fiscal situation both through expenditure reduction and sourcing funds for developing its infrastructure from the market.
According to an official release, under the expenditure reduction measures the state government has decided to downsize itself to the extent of 30 per cent over the next five years.
Alongside reduction in government expenditure, the government would augment revenues to meet the outlays for infrastructure sector through bonds.
As the state plans to undertake major capital expenditure on infrastructure particularly in the irrigation and the roads sector, the state government has set up an Infrastructure Board and a Rs 500 crore of road bonds have been floated.
Apart from this, revision of user charges has been undertaken with the objective of covering operational costs in core sectors like irrigation, health and education.
On the expenditure reduction, steps initiated include ban on foreign travel at government's expense and long distance calls from residential premises. The state government has also put a tab on air travel and petrol consumption. The government has also decided to discard vehicles purchased before December 1987 and has limited their replacement.
The government imposed an immediate ban on recruitments and transfers. Creation of new posts was stopped and all fresh appointments including appointments in police, health and education departments have been temporarily frozen.
The ability of the state government to take hard decisions and to stick by them has helped its cause of fiscal management. The daily wage workers dispute has been handled with
determination.
All departments have been made responsible for their programmes within sanctioned budgets. Ad-hoc requests of most departments for increases in budgetary allocations have been turned down and new items of expenditure are now confined to really important items.
Officials using government vehicles are now allowed a monthly consumption of 60 litres of petrol from 85 earlier. The STD facility for officers at home, has been withdrawn and only senior officers of the rank of secretary and above will be entitled to have STD on office telephones.