As confusion continues to prevail in the engineering cadre over the bifurcation of the Public Works Department (PWD), a month’s time has been given to clear a path for the proposal that is nearly four decades old.
Sources in the PWD said Chief Secretary T.M. Vijay Bhaskar issued a direction to this effect during a meeting last week.
The bifurcation move — proposed way back in the 1980s but fructifying only now — will mean a separate Water Resources Department breaking away from the parent PWD.
This apart, an order to move Ports and Inland Waterways to the Infrastructure Department from the PWD came last week. Till recently, it was engineers from the PWD who were deputed to works in the Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Department, which now has its own engineering cadre. Earlier, the PWD also had within its purview the Housing Board, Slum Clearance Board, Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board, and Agricultural Produce Market Committee, among others.
With all these bureaucratic changes, engineers from the PWD have been given the option to chose from the departments. Several engineers have complained of problems in career moves after they were given the option to choose the department they wanted to be with.
“While there are more engineers and fewer posts in the PWD, promotion avenues are limited. In other departments, there could be promotion options. A good number of engineers have not opted for any, hoping that this bifurcation move will not happen,” a source in the PWD said.
A senior official blamed the Department of Personnel and Administrative Reforms (DPAR) for the current problem. “The DPAR allowed the Water Resources Department to have its own cadre and recruitment rules in 2014, and for RDPR in 2016 when PWD engineers were still working for those departments. The DPAR should have thought about the consequences. There is a permanent committee under the Additional Chief Secretary,” the official said, adding that the same committee had now been tasked with finding a solution.
Acknowledging the problem, another senior PWD official said engineers were now fearing a decrease in promotion opportunities. The official said there was a thought that the deployment and redeployment process should be a systematic effort instead of each department taking its own decisions.
