Telangana government 'preferring' outsourcing staff to permanent ones?

Ranga Reddy: Telangana State government is now recruiting temporary employees over permanent employees in all government departments. The government is recruiting employees with outsourcing and contract methods who will only work for certain time period. Even though there are one lakh yet-to-be-filled posts in several government departments, the government is not bothered about those vacant posts and has also postponed the job notifications. At present 2.10 lakh temporary employees are working in various government departments.

Recently police department has planned to recruit a total of 2,092 posts with outsourcing and contract method in the State and has extended tenure of 190 posts for another year from previously recruited contract employees. There are a total of 2.10 lakh temporary employees in all the government departments across the State, while 1.45 lakh employees were recruited by outsourcing method 65,000 employees were recruited by contract method.

Education, Health, Revenue and Municipal departments are mostly filled with temporary employees whose salaries vary from Rs 8,000 to 10,000 per month and outsourcing employees have to pay commission to job agencies.

A total of 661 Gurukuls were established across the State after Telangana was newly formed and all the teaching staff posts were converted to permanent posts . However, only few teaching staff posts were recruited. The rest of 3,000 posts were recruited by outsourcing method in Gurukuls across the State.

Government released notifications for 9,355 junior panchayat secretaries with conditions saying that employees has sign a contract of 3 years with salaries varying from 10,000-15,000 per month. TIMS hospital which is treating Covid patients at present has lack of doctors and medical staff so government released notifications for approximately 3,500 posts however, no one came forward as those posts were also contract posts with less salaries. Agricultural department in State has 200 AEOs who were recruited by outsourcing method and 1,500 are recruited in Irrigation department. The government is planning to recruit 2,500 lakh by outsourcing method.

The Telangana government is recruiting the employees on the basis of outsourcing. The outsourcing agencies are not paying the salaries to the employees on time. Recently, nurses in several hospitals held a strike against the agencies to pay them the salaries on time. There are allegations that these temporary employees are not working properly. due to this act of government, the people as well as the government are facing problems.