Chief Minister Conrad Sangma today said that only two autonomous district councils – GHADC and JHADC are facing financial crisis even as he said that random appointment of employees was the reason for the fund problem faced by the two councils.
Sangma was addressing the media following his meeting with the chiefs of the three district councils.
“Financial crisis is an issue seen only with GHADC and JHADC. We are not seeing that much in KHADC,” Sangma said.
“The GHADC in 2015-16 had closed to 2,500 employees whereas KHADC even today has less than 800 employees and this happened because during that time appointments were made without any kind of sanction or any kind of process or recruitment system and it was made purely at a political will,” Sangma said.
He mentioned that the forest department of GHADC alone has 450 employees today while the education department of JHADC has 300 employees.
“The education department was transferred in the 90s to the State government but certain schools were left or they recruited again at that point in time and today there is something called District Council lower primary schools still functioning in JHADC. Hence, those kinds of burdens were not rationalised at that point in time and the impact of these kinds of recruitments that took place without any sanction and without any procedure is having the impact on the district councils now,” Sangma said.
Stating that he has been closely monitoring the situation in the district councils, Sangma informed that no new appointments have been made in the last five-six years in the GHADC and if any employee retired the post was rationalised and those employees who were put in non-sanctioned posts were put in those retired on sanctioned posts.
“So there were a lot of restrictions in the last five to six years and that is why we were able to reduce the numbers from 2,500 to less than 1500 employees. There are about 1400 employees in GHADC but it is still a huge number,” he explained.
The chief minister also said that certain district councils do not have service rules or rather they had service rules which are very old.
“Some of the service rules were there but not followed at a certain point in time. In certain cases the service rule was amended and sent but again changes were made and were pending for some time. So these kinds of small administrative matters have delayed the service rules in certain cases and yes because of that there were some recruitment issues. But once these rules are in place, once procedures are in place then it will not be so simple for somebody to just flout the rules and do as they desire or as they wish,” he said.
Asked if there is any rethinking to do away with ADCs, Sangma said that councils are very important for our state because they protect the identity, the overall culture and the custom and the heritage of our state and our people.
“District councils have a very important role to play and they should continue but we need to find ways to improve the administration to improve the financial performance and to streamline the process and increase the overall revenue so that they can be stable,” Sangma said.
