New Delhi [India], November 21 (ANI): Union Minister Jitendra Singh has said that the (Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) is keen to ensure timely promotions without the slightest delay, and assured a delegation about the department's concern linked to the timely promotions of government employees in various cadres.

The Minister was speaking to a Central Secretariat Rajbhasha Seva Sangathan delegation that called on him in New Delhi on Monday.

Assuring that the DoPT under the Ministry of Personnel is equally concerned about the timely promotions of government employees in various cadres, Singh said, the DoPT had approved the mass promotion of 1,592 officials working in the capacity of Assistant Section Officers (ASOs) to the post of Section Officers (SOs) on ad hoc basis with immediate effect in June this year.

The Minister further said about 9,000 mass promotions were made last year alone and prior to that the DoPT granted 4,000 promotions in the preceding three years.

Expressing their gratitude to Singh for his personal intervention in approving mass promotions, the members of the delegation requested the Minister incharge DoPT to review the promotion policy in their cadre as the promotion prospects are less, affecting the morale of the employees.

Singh also said Prime Minister Narendra Modi is very keen that hardworking and performing officials should be provided with a work-friendly environment and at the same time, be provided with timely service benefits so that they remain motivated to give in their best for nation-building.

Minister said that in the last over nine years, under the guidance of PM Modi, the government has periodically reviewed the longstanding stagnation issues in the various Central Ministries, that are a legacy of the past due to pending court cases, lack of vacancies in higher grades and other personnel issues.

The Minister further said the government is concerned about long stagnation in certain cadres and at certain levels where some of the employees working in the lowest rung of the administration spend their entire service tenure of 30 to 35 years without getting a single promotion.

The DoPT Minister said he has discussed the issue with all the senior officers in the Department and several innovative steps have been initiated to avoid stagnation at the middle and lower rungs of the administration.

Singh regretted that in a large number of cases, stagnation in promotions was the result of litigations prompted by inappropriate decisions taken or rules twisted to give out-of-turn promotions by the previous governments.

In a few of the 4,000 promotions cleared in recent years, the Minister said, the government granted promotions despite the cases being sub-judice by consulting legal experts and making valid provisions for judicial scrutiny.

The orders for mass promotion of these employees belonging to the CSS cadre were issued after several rounds of high-level meetings in DoPT chaired by Singh in the preceding months.

In order to bring in the ease of governance as well as objectivity in empanelment, the government has, in the last nine years, improvised upon the procedures so as to ensure that there are no subjective preferences involved in carrying out the promotions.

"Procedures have been made more hi-tech using sophisticated technology tools to minimize the human interface," said the Minister. adding "as part of administrative reforms, the government has done away with over 1,600 rules which were either obsolete or had become irrelevant with the passage of time.""All this is meant not only to ensure effective and timely delivery of outcomes for the public, but also to enable the employees to perform to the best of their ability," Singh added. (ANI)