Acomprehensive civil service review is on the cards. Ministry of Civil Service permanent secretary Parmesh Chand said this would be done to determine the actual size of the civil service.
“We always pick this figure — 30,000 to 35,000 — civil servants but nobody has objectively determined what is the actual number of people on the ground and the actual vacancies and the actual number of people required to deliver each department’s work program,” he said.
“We have basically chopped and changed and fitted in extra as we have moved along.
So, there’s a lot of inefficiencies in the establishment numbers in civil service.
“We are doing a lot of work on determining the right person to post configurations and what the actual size of ministries are and what extra do they need.
There will be a substantive review on this.
“There will be a substantive review of the civil service establishment, the numbers, the size of the service and then we will feed the outcomes of the review into the budget process.”
He also said the review was necessary to determine the strength of the civil service, which would then allow the ministry to better manage allocated resources.
“The review of civil service will be done in close collaboration with all the stakeholders, with the unions and the worker representatives.
We haven’t done much more than just it being on the table at the moment.”
