Bureaucrats busy feuding over perks
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aimed at destabilising the country by misdirecting public administration reforms”.
ABM Sattar, president of the BCS (Administration) Welfare Multipurpose Cooperative Society Ltd, at the event demanded the scrapping of the commission and the resignation of its chairman Abdul Muyeed Chowdhury within 48 hours.
He even issued a thinly veiled threat. He said if the commission chairman does not resign, they know “how to materialise their demand”.
At the protest held at the BIAM Foundation auditorium in Dhaka, he said if their demands were not met, they would hold a rally in Dhaka on January 4.
At a programme, Chairman Muyeed on December 17 said the commission was for separate service commissions for education and health cadres, similar to the judicial service commission.
He said the commission was also considering recommending a 50:50 ratio of administration and other cadres for promotion to the rank of deputy secretary.
Currently, the ratio is 75:25.
This sparked intense dissatisfaction among officials of the administration cadre. They argued that a position like deputy secretary is meant to be exclusive to administration cadres. The best candidates are selected for the administration cadre through BCS exams, according to them.
While talking to the newspaper, a joint secretary said it would be illogical to give equal opportunities to someone who scored 650 out of 1,000 and someone who scored 850 to enter the administration cadre.
However, officials from other 25 cadres believe promotions to the deputy secretary rank and higher should be made following competition between officials of all cadres. They say those positions were not specifically meant for any particular cadre.
This dispute has been ongoing for a long time. Officials of the other cadres even went to the court, and the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court in its verdict kept the 75:25 ratio.
Dhaka’s Deputy Commissioner Tanvir Ahmed, also a leader of the administration cadre officials, told The Daily Star, “The Supreme Court’s full bench reviewed the matter comprehensively and ruled that reserving 75 percent of the positions [deputy secretary] for administration cadre officials is legitimate. Among the judges who made this decision, five later served as chief justices.
“In reality, the positions of deputy secretary and above are inherently meant for the administration cadre… the solution should be to reform the system to bring 100 percent of these positions under the administration cadre.”
Meanwhile, education and health cadre officials oppose the notion of separate service commissions for them. Representatives from these cadres, at press conferences in Dhaka on December 23 and 24, announced a rally in the city on January 4.
Mokhles Ur Rahman, senior secretary to the Ministry of Public Administration and member secretary of the Public Administration Reform Commission, told The Daily Star the draft recommendations mentioned by the commission were not final.
“We are still consulting different stakeholders, and the commission’s final recommendations will incorporate everyone’s opinions. We hope to reach an acceptable solution,” he added.
The commission is scheduled to meet a delegation of admin officials today.
Around 55,000 officials are serving across 26 cadres, including 6,342 officers in the administration cadre.
While the Appellate Division ruling in 2010 temporarily put a lid on the matter, the dispute got reignited after deputy secretaries and above were given vehicle benefits in 2017.
The Hasina-led government at the time started giving interest-free car loans of up to Tk 30 lakh to each of them. They also received Tk 50,000 per month for vehicle maintenance and were required to repay about half the loan amount.
This benefit, however, was not extended to officials of other cadres.
Officials from the other 25 cadres also demanded similar benefits, but were denied. As a result, they moved their focus to increasing the ratio for promotion to deputy secretary.
After the fall of the Hasina-led government on August 5 and the subsequent formation of the reform commission, officials of the 25 cadres have organised rallies in divisional cities, and held press conferences, roundtable discussions and other programmes to press home their demands.
An official of the information cadre told The Daily Star that the administration cadres not only receive car benefits but also enjoy promotions even when there are no vacant posts.
“Such privileges are unimaginable for officers of other cadres,” he said.
An agriculture cadre official said after Hasina’s fall, there were promotions en masse to the ranks of deputy secretary, joint secretary, additional secretary, and secretary.
Even officers convicted in departmental cases got promotions. “Are the administration cadre officials only ones doing the government’s work?” the officer said.
An education cadre officer added that 764 former administration cadre officers are likely to get promoted so that they get financial benefits and some of them could get contract-based appointments.
“How do you expect officers of other cadres to remain restrained?”