Gogoi asks state Fin Deptt to do away with retention of posts

PTI
Guwahati, July 6

To give relief to thousands of state government employees, Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi has directed the Finance Department to do away with the existing system of retention of posts.
“In order to remove the difficulties faced by the employees, Gogoi directed that the entire process may be simplified and redundant processes be removed, particularly in case of regular employees holding a sanctioned post,” an official release said.
Gogoi directed that no employee should be denied timely salary because of the time consuming process of retention of posts, it said.He said the retention process was diverting office resources from more productive work for the benefit of the citizens.
Accordingly, Finance the Department has now revamped the entire system of retention of posts and issued new guidelines in form of an Office Memorandum.
“From now, all posts, both under plan and non-plan, which were created with the prior concurrence of Planning and Development and Finance Departments, will be of permanent nature and no further retention will be necessary,” the statement said.
This will, however, exclude cases like posts created for only a specific period, adhoc basis etc.
“In effect, employees will no longer have to worry about the status of retention of their posts either in the Directorates or Secretariat and can focus on sincerely carrying out their duties,” the statement said.
Until now, almost all posts were deemed to have temporary status at the time of creation and later the posts had to be granted annual retention and after a period of five years or more, the posts could be granted permanent status.
Employees could draw salaries only for the period when the posts were retained either annually or permanently.
The process of annual retention of posts required proposals to be submitted from the employees’ office to the Directorates and then to be processed in the Secretariat.
“At times, retention of posts could not be made immediately after the expiry of earlier retention period. Permanent retention was also, at times, delayed. This resulted in delay to draw timely salaries,” the statement added.