National
Over 7k govt staff apply to serve at local level
More than 7,000 government staff have applied to work at the local level, the Ministry of Federal Affairs and General Administration has said.
More than 7,000 government staff have applied to work at the local level, the Ministry of Federal Affairs and General Administration has said.
Officials at the ministry, which has been sorting applications based on the ministries and services the public servants belong to, said the estimated number is for 65 districts, applications received from which have been categorised.
The number could rise once the forms arriving from all the 77 districts are sorted, officials said. Some applications collected by several other ministries are still with them, according to the Federal Affairs Ministry.
On April 16, the ministry asked civil servants to submit their applications to their respective office by listing 15 preferred local units in five districts by May 1. After the government had failed to fill the vacancies at the local level, applications from interested staffers were invited.
“Since we’re still updating and adjusting the details, we have not calculated the exact number of government staffers applying,” said a senior official at the ministry. “However, based on the
applications we’ve updated so far, the number is expected to remain between 7000 and 8,000.”
According to Prem Prasad Luitel, under-secretary at the ministry, most of the applications are from officials already mobilised at the local level. “They want to go to other local units,” he said. “The number of officials seeking to go to the local level from the centre is small.”
The government aims to mobilise interested staffers as soon as the applicants are categorised based on the ministry and services they belong to.
“We aim to complete updating and categorising the applications by Monday,” said General Administration Secretary Dinesh Thapaliya. “The process of posting staffers begins thereafter.”
According to officials, this is a temporary measure to help out the local units until the permanent deployment process starts after an Organisation and Management Survey in each local unit.
Temporary staff mobilisation will be based on the Standards on Mobilising Government Staffers at the Local Level-2018 introduced on April 16.
According to the document, staffers will be deployed based on their seniority, preferred job stations and permanent address. If there are more applicants than the number of staff required in a certain local unit, excess staff will be mobilised to another unit within the district or province, according to the standards.
If both husband and wife are in government service, priority will be on mobilising both at the same local unit or any other unit in the district. Earlier, the Cabinet approved a total of 37,257 positions for the local units—municipalities, rural municipalities and District Coordination Committees.
There are a total of 21,716 officials at the local level recruited by the erstwhile local bodies, those mobilised by the local offices of the central administrative bodies and the Centre. This means around 16,000 more officials will have to be deployed to the local level, according to the ministry.