TS staff to write parting notes
Employees of the state government will be allowed to share their experiences in the job six months before they are set for retirement.
The parting note could include their experience with their higher-ups, colleagues, and their achievements among others. This facility is currently available only for All-India Service officials.
The General Administration Department (GAD) will be the nodal agency to monitor this programme. The GAD is in the process of finalising the guidelines for implementing the same.
The purpose of this exercise is to let the juniors learn from their experiences. These notes would be posted online after required editing by the government so as to make them non-controversial.
These experiences, however, would be accessible only to government departments and not the general public. The government may remove controversial remarks against ministers, MPs, MLAs, MLCs and higher officials like IAS officers from the parting notes.
After the NDA came to power at the Centre in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi floated this idea for Central government employees.
Following this, the department of personnel and training has lau-nched the programme “Anubhav” enabling retiring AIS officials to share their experiences. However, some departments opposed this saying that this would lead to unnecessary controversies in case of officials making any adverse remarks against ministers or higher officials of pressurising them to do ‘favours’ in file clearing etc. They sought ‘editing’ of copies before they are posted online. However, the DoPT rejected editing of these copies.
Similar objections are being expressed by higher officials in Telangana over the scheme. There are instances of ministers and public representatives bringing pressure on officials and staff to clear the files overlooking the objections/queries raised by them and if those requests are not granted, they are transferred.
If officials share such experiences in their copies while retiring, it may cause embarrassment to the government besides giving enough fodder for Opposition parties to attack the government. “So it was proposed to edit all the copies before posting them online. The copies have to be submitted to heads of departments. After getting clearance of HoDs, they will be posted online,” said GAD officials.