Bhubaneswar: Even as the country is hit by economic slowdown, the state government has started taking measures to cut expenditure under various heads.
In this regard, Chief Secretary Asit Tripathy Thursday wrote to secretaries of all departments asking them not to engage private consultants or independent agencies for providing technical and management support to the government.
Owing to shortage of manpower, administrative departments were allowed to establish Project Monitoring Units (PMUs) or Technical Support Units (TSUs) and engage external consultants in 2011 to provide necessary support to the departments in critical areas.
Accordingly, many departments put in place PMUs/TSUs and engaged external consultants for different purposes and paid huge amounts to them every year.
“It was intended to be an ad hoc mechanism to strengthen officers’ technical capabilities. However, in many cases they have been engaged for routine nature of work without contributing to the institutional memory and capacity building in the respective departments. More and more, the departments are becoming dependent on outside resources and are not utilising the manpower available in the internal system,” Tripathy said in his letter.
In the last few years, the government has made recruitments in different cadres. Many candidates having experience and expertise in technical domains have also joined government service.
“Creation of new PMUs/TSUs with external resources should be discouraged and in rarest of the rare cases it may be established for short-term duration with minimum outside support,” he suggested.
The Chief Secretary also directed the departments to identify suitable talents among lower and middle-level government employees and engage them in PMUs/TSUs.