29 May Articles
CPSU CADRE HIERARCHY APPROVED BY BSNL BOARD ON PROSPECTIVE DATE IMPLEMENTATION
Dear Friends
BSNL Board in its meeting held today afternoon at Hyderabad approved CPSU Cadre Hierarchy on prospective date i.e. date of notification of implementation. The CPSU Cadre Hierarchy implementation with prospective date is definitely a big loss, as all those who have not been promoted or who have been promoted just now shall be loosing 1.5 years. If the notification of policy goes beyond 1st July than the promotion will start from 1st January 2019 and effectively making it a two year loss. We will be taking stock of the situation and decide our next course. The benefits envisaged for the youngsters that they would get the promotion with 1.5 years service length is totally gone now. This is not at all acceptable to us.
The proposal as circulated earlier has been approved with slight changes like Non Functional Post of Joint DGM for executives in AGM grade getting E5-E6 scales, APAR grading based on Numerical Averages of Five years, Relaxation in Residency Period for those placed in higher scales, Board also directed to devise some benefit for Reserved Category Candidates which will be explored and submitted before notification of the policy. We have suggested for these changes and the same has found due favor.
Our suggestion for ensuring quota between LDCE and seniority Cum Fitness has been accepted and hence all SCF and LDCE candidates of same vacancy year shall be promoted together on same day. If SCF candidate of one vacancy year is promoted than LDCE candidate of the same vacancy years shall be promoted together irrespective of the number of years served and vice versa.
Time bound promotion will remain intact. Benchmarks remain the same as proposed earlier in circulated proposal.
However, our plea for incorporating qualification bar has not been accepted. Residency Period of 12 years remains unchanged and no weightage for qualification has been given in Residency Period. Fast track policy has not been discussed at all leading to murmurs of initiating MT recruitment. Management will have to come out clean on aspects like MT recruitment, Interchangeability of Responsibilities, Fast Track promotion policy for youngsters, and weightage of qualification. Even the service advantage of two years is gone now. These things will have to be taken care of and we will be shortly coming up with our next course of actions considering these aspects. We cannot allow any policy, which results into MT and loss for DRs.
As the CPSU policy will be from prospective date, in our opinion, existing vacancies will have to be filled up to ensure parity between all set of executives else anomaly may arise between those who have been promoted and those who have not been promoted leading to litigations. Parity between executives promoted through earlier RRs and Executives promoted though new Policy will always be legally challengeable.
The Seniority in JTO and AGM cadre need to issued or defined clearly before going to CPSU implementation, to avoid further litigations. At the same time, the JTOs who have completed 3 year regular service should be given with chance to get SDE vacancy years from 2012 to 2018, on eligibility basis under SCF / LDCE quotas, lest they will be put to disadvantage on non getting of promotions. Therefore, this intervening period should be utilized to execute all the pending promotions and filling up of all the vacancies.
The main concern of our pay scale change JTO-E2, SDE -E3 was also needed to be mapped to those cadre, as agreed to us, to minimize the pay loss. Now with DPE rejecting proposals of NTPC/NHPC for two different posts in same pay scale, it becomes an absolute necessity to upgrade the scales of JTO to E2 and SDE to E3 and doing away with non-functional scale of Senior SDE by merging Senior SDE scale with SDE Scale else scale degradation will be very much imminent as Cascading of Scales can never be implemented in BSNL keeping the financial condition of BSNL in mind and greater Pension liability of DoT. Now Merging of Sr. SDE scale with SDE scale is the only option to keep this CPSU policy flawless.
AIGETOA is the association who vouched for Contemporary CPSU hierarchy from year 2005 when others were completely against it. If it would have found due favor of management at that time perhaps all the HR anomalies in BSNL would have gone by now. However, we are happy that CPSU word has now going to become reality but to realize the same, genuine aspirations of BSNL recruits with respect to Qualification Bar, Executing all pending promotions to prevent further litigations, Deciding on the future of Senior SDE scales, Decision on Fast Track Policy, Clarity with regard to scrapping of MT RRs, Suitable relaxation in Residency Period for executives with professional qualifications, The work/job profiles of each cadre along with clarity on cluster reporting system, Doing away with the Interchangeability of Job responsibilities are the aspects which needs to be corrected immediately.
Executives may wonder, if AIGETOA was having so many objections than why it allowed this policy to be matured and go through. The fact is that we have been raising and submitting our objections but acceptance of the proposal was the first necessity. As per the policy, Management Committee itself can settle all above apprehensions of AIGETOA as the proposal empowers Management Committee of BSNL (Committee Consisting of Internal Directors of BSNL) to approve the changes based on requirement, which does not have any financial implications. AIGETOA has always believed in a pragmatic approach but the same should not come at the cost of benefits associated with Direct Recruits. We request our sister associations also to analyze these apprehensions and ensure the corrective action in advance to put in place a rugged and litigation free policy. AIGETOA is concerned and committed to open the reality and get the justified dues for BSNL recruits in the new policy implementation and we hope that now with the concurrence of BSNL Board on the CPSU policy, these genuine aspirations will definitely be taken care of by our sister associations.