AMARAVATI: Many government departments are struggling with severe shortage of manpower as successive governments have failed to fill the vacancies. School education department is facing severe faculty crunch as about 50,000 teacher posts are lying vacant for the past several years.
Though the state government wanted to fill up majority of the vacancies by announcing a regular job calendar, the process hit the road block due to the financial crisis. The government put the recruitment drive including in the schools temporarily on hold after the Covid-19 deepened the already bleeding financial health.
The state government had in fact anticipated that the workload on mainline departments will come down as it recruited more than 1.26 lakh regular employees into newly created ward and village secretariat system. In addition to the regular employees available in the secretariat, large pool of village and ward volunteers are also shouldering the burden of service delivery from government.
The arrival of village and ward secretariat system has been playing major role in taking the government services to the door steps of the people. Almost 4.5 crore families of the total 5 crore population in state are getting majority of services in ward/village secretariats located in their neighbourhood.
In fact, the state government had gone for massive recruitment drive in the health department following the outbreak of Covid-19 two years ago. The state government had even filled up the vacancies of doctors, paramedical staff and technical assistants in majority of the hospitals in the state. Interestingly, the government identified nearly 22,000 vacancies in medical and health department even after taking up massive recruitment. "The health department has about 26,094 regular employees against the sanctioned strength of 47,926. However, several of these vacancies were filled through contract and outsourcing basis," said a senior official of health department.
The school education and higher education departments are the worst hit due to the delay in taking up recruitment. "We have found that there are about 66,309 vacancies in different departments. We will take up measures to fill up the slots in a phased manner depending on the requirement," said finance minister Buggana Rajendranath.
