KARACHI: Of the total 663,234 sanctioned posts in the federal government, over 81,000 are currently vacant, according to data released by the Establishment Division.

As per the annual bulletin about the employees for 2018-19, the total number of sanctioned federal government posts stood at 663,234 but 581,755 employees and officers were available for these positions, showing a vacancy of about 81,479 posts, or 12.29 per cent of the total.

Similarly, a total of 399,265 employees were working in 206 autonomous bodies and corporations of the federal government against the sanctioned strength of 515,174, showing a shortfall of 115,909.

In the previous year, there were 492,564 sanctioned posts, of which 397,487 were occupied. This shows an increase of 4.59pc in the sanctioned and 0.45pc in the actual working strength for government bodies.

It follows that the public sector employment situation is a mixed trend of increase and decrease in the number of civil servants over the past 10 years. The job opportunities in public sector almost remained fluctuant between 2009-10 and 2018-19.

A total of 663,234 jobs are sanctioned against which 581,755 people are working

However, during the last five years, from 2014-15 to 2018-19, the size of the federal government in respect of its sanctioned and actual strength of employees shows an upward trend of 6.17pc and 5.96pc (on average basis), respectively.

The trend for autonomous bodies and corporations too showed an increase of 4.59pc in the sanctioned and 0.45pc in the actual working strength.

In terms of breakdown, there are 13,347 secretariat employees but 2,811 positions are lying vacant. The highest number of vacancies was observed in the attached/subordinate departments with existing strength at 558, 943 and 77,028 positions unassigned.

The distribution of actual strength shows that a small share of 4.63pc is occupied by the officers working in basic scales 17-22, whereas 95.37pc is occupied by employees working in basic scales 1-16, which is a very large share in the total number of federal government civil servants.

Among the divisions of the federal government, the Interior Division is the largest administrative unit due to Civil Armed Forces (CAF) which comes out to be 39.67pc (230,817) of the actual working strength (581,755).

The second largest unit is the Defence Division with 21.76pc while Railways, Postal Services and Revenue Division with 12.52pc, 5.05pc and 3.60pc rank third, fourth and fifth, respectively, as compared to other divisions having a collective share of 17.40pc.

Domicile breakdown

The provincial analysis shows that employment growth witnessed an overall increase — Punjab (0.38pc), Sindh (0.71pc), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (7.66pc), Balochistan (7.97pc), Azad Jammu and Kashmir (0.4pc) and tribal areas (123.08pc).

Among the 581,755 employees working in the federal government, Punjab has a lion’s share of 263,567 employees, accounting for 47.66pc of the total when combined with 2.35pc of Islamabad.

KP has a 26pc share while Sindh has 14.01pc (Sindh Rural 7.30pc and Urban 6.71pc), tribal areas 5.47pc, Balochistan 4.54pc, AJK 1.26pc while Gilgit-Baltistan has a share of 1.06pc.

For autonomous bodies, GB witnessed the highest growth (10.65pc) in terms of employment.

The share of employees having domicile of Sindh increased by 1.63pc (Sindh urban by 7.04pc), Balochistan by 1.48pc, and Azad Jammu and Kashmir by 3.75pc.

However, the share of employees of Punjab, including Islamabad, increased by 0.19pc as compared to the last year while decreasing tendency was observed in Sindh (R) by 4.42pc, KP by 1.31pc, and 1.94pc for tribal areas employees.

Minorities

There are 16,612 non-Muslim employees in the federal government. A sizable number of 14,989 (90.23pc) are Christians, whereas 297 (1.79pc) are Ahmadis, 1,073 (6.46pc) are Hindus (caste), 173 (1.04pc) are Hindus (non-caste), 18 (0.11pc) are Sikhs and 62 (0.37pc) belong to other religions.

Published in Dawn, March 12th, 2020