EPFO to meet staff unions on Friday for cadre restructuring talks

EPFO's cadre restructuring panel to meet unions to discuss staff shortages, workload, and career progression; IIT Delhi report on tech-led reforms due by December

In a bid to estimate future manpower requirements, restructure the cadre to harmonise with career aspirations of employees, and enhance service delivery, the cadre restructuring (CR) committee of the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) is slated to hold a meeting with all its associations, federations, and staff unions on Friday.

 

The outcomes of the two-day meeting may result in increased staff strength of the retirement fund body, and benefit thousands of serving employees to avail themselves of faster promotions.

 

Currently, EPFO has 21 zonal offices, 138 regional offices, 114 district offices, and five special state offices. According to the latest government data, EPFO has around 24,000 sanctioned posts in Group A, B & C, out of which close to 9,000 are lying vacant.

 

 

“Cadre review is not held regularly in EPFO, leading to stagnation across all the cadres. In fact, instructions of DoPT (Department of Personnel and Training) and the Cabinet Secretariat direct that all cadre-controlling authorities must carry out cadre review every five years in order to remove anomalies. Further, the workload has increased manifold in the past decade, which calls for increased staff strength,” said one of the representatives of the staff union participating in the meeting on the condition of anonymity.

 

In the last cadre restructuring exercise, which was approved in July 2016 by the Central Board of Trustees (CBT), the number of Group A posts increased to 1,039 from 859 earlier.

 

Earlier in November last year, during the CBT meeting, the labour minister had directed to form an in-house committee of officers to examine, analyse, and propose cadre restructuring in EPFO.

 

 

 

“He also reiterated that as mentioned by the members, the workload of EPFO has increased many folds since 2015, though technology has also been inducted, but an analysis may be carried out for addressing cadre restructuring needs of EPFO at the earliest,” the minutes of the CBT meeting read.

 

Harbhajan Sidhu, member, CBT, said that even these (Group A) posts are lying vacant, and instead of filling existing vacancies, EPFO has taken recourse to use of technology or transferring the workload to private contractors.

 

“The organisational structure, the redeployment and disposition of manpower, and the career paths of staff need to be taken up as a comprehensive proposal for adoption. This is because the staff who deal with member subscribers on ground are overburdened with work. Last year, a massive exercise was undertaken to fill around 2,500 vacancies, but that ran into troubles. The government should take this up and fill these vacancies. Contractualisation is not the way out,” he added.

 

In the meantime, IIT Delhi has also been tasked to come up with a report on cadre restructuring, with a focus on leveraging technology for automatic claims settlement. It is expected to submit the report by December. 

On the agenda

 

• Enhancing service delivery
• Helping employees avail of faster promotions
• Increasing staff strength of the retirement fund administrator