The Vacant Space!
Nature abhors vacuum, not a vacancy.
If you think, the Customs and Central Excise (Service Tax added) Department is flooded with officers, you are mistaken. In 2002, in the name of cadre review, they promoted anybody they could find, but after that there was a lull and now in almost all cadres starting from Assistant to Chief Commissioner there is a large number of vacancies which the CBEC/Chief Commissioners are not able to fill.
The ad-hoc promotion is continuing merrily in all the Group A cadres and now they want to make even Commissioners ad-hoc. Even before one batch of ad-hoc officers are confirmed another ad-hoc promotion is proposed in the cadre of JCs with a few seats reserved for appraiser promotees, which it appears, had been shot down by the DOPT.
The major item of work for all the senior officers in the Department seems to be transfers and promotions and even with this full time commercial activity, they are not able to fill up the vacant slots. So many officers waiting in the wings for that much elusive promotion are just doing that– waiting!
The Chairman, CBEC had mentioned in our Vizag seminar about the difficulty of recruiting new hands– He had mentioned that it takes about three years to get inspectors recruited. And that is exactly what has happened. Yesterday, CBEC had released a list of about 200 candidates selected as Inspectors by the Staff Selection Commission in the Graduate Level Examination, 2005. Even now the selection is not complete – they have to undergo a physical test including cycling! That will take another six months! That means a graduate who took the test in 2005 will get his job in 2009–after four years! And the Government expects him to be unemployed for these four years to grab the great opportunity of becoming a Central Excise Inspector. Obviously these boys and girls who passed the SSC examination are quite intelligent and by this time they must be employed in lucrative jobs and it is a safe bet that many of them will not join.
The Government should realise that days have changed and nobody is going to wait for four years to get that great government job.
So, Direct Recruitment is a slow and painful process, but why can't you fill up the vacancies by promotion? There are Superintendents in the Department who have completed 31 years in the Department, eagerly waiting for their second promotion in life–there are vacancies, but they are not being promoted!
There are senior Commissioners, not serious with their jobs, because they are expecting a promotion any moment–this any moment may be a couple of years. There are additional Commissioners planning their transfer strategy with an eye on promotion–like now you go to Timbuktu, hoping that you will become a Commissioner in a few months and you can come back to the main stream – you are stuck in Timbuktu, for the DPC is not held or you have just missed the bus!
With so many stakes in transfers and promotions, it is a miracle that they have time for other activities like issuing Show cause Notices.
They got sanctioned about 92 post of Commissioners (Appeals) on the plea that more Commissioners (Appeals) means more Revenue, as if the trade was just waiting for the orders from the Commissioners (Appeals) to stand in queue outside the Designated Banks to pay up the demands confirmed by these Commissioners (Appeals). Anyway they got their posts, but then nobody was prepared to work as Commissioner (Appeals). Today there are more than 70 vacancies in the cadre of Commissioners and most of them are that of Commissioners (Appeals)!
Today the Chief Commissioner, Customs, Bangalore Mrs. Heera Radhakrishnan is retiring and with her retirement, four posts become vacant. She was the Chief Commissioner also of the much publicised Bangalore LTU. Incidentally they were never able to post full-time Chief Commissioners for the LTUs. Now after her retirement, the posts held by her will be given as additional charge to some other Chief Commissioner. And this additional charge can be really crazy – A Bangalore officer holds additional charge of Kochi , while a Chennai based officer holds an additional charge in Bangalore , an Ahmedabad officer holds additional charge of Hyderabad – you have the airlines clogged with all these additional charge officers flying to and fro–and demanding up-gradation on-flight!
In the process, review by the Committee of Chief Commissioner and Commissioners has become a joke–already the CBEC Member is under summons by the Kolkata CESTAT–the issue is live in all other Zones!
Where are we headed to? If 20 posts of Chief Commissioners, 70 odd posts of Commissioners and hundreds of posts of JCs and ACs can be kept vacant and still the Revenue grows, can't we simply abolish all these vacant posts? There is something terribly wrong with the Human Recourses Management in this vitally important Revenue Department!