LAHORE, April 18: The Punjab government will review the overall deputation policy and completely ban the absorption of officials of the provincial and federal governments in the deputed departments.

Official sources said here on Friday that there was no plan to abolish the system of deputation. In fact, the new government wanted to rationalise it to eliminate the chances of unnecessary deputations, overstaying of the officers in the provincial government departments where they work on deputation, and their absorption.

These factors were causing innumerable problems like blocking the promotion prospects of officials of the departments, but were grossly ignored by the previous government, they said.

The officials said the government would most probably disallow overstaying of officials from the federal government or other provincial departments who work in Punjab on technical quota in departments like health, education, accounts and finance.

Actually, technical officials were sent to these departments to share their expertise with the provincial government. But they should be repatriated after the completion of their tenure so that their own departments could take benefit of their expertise and what they had learnt of the official procedure of handling important matters in the offices where they worked on deputation.

But the practice in Punjab had been to allow overstaying of the experts, which not only rusted their abilities but also deprived their parent departments of their vital services.

A large number of federal government officers in BS-17 and BS-18 did come to Punjab to fill vacuum of posts here. But unfortunately the past government did not fill the vacuum of vacancies and instead posted the favoured federal government employees against specific posts.

The present government was also going to review this policy and would most probably allow deputation of federal government officers in departments where their services were needed the most. There would not be any posting against specific posts, the officials said.

The government, they said, would continue to allow the deputation of the spouses of officers working in Punjab because the number of such officers had always been minimal.

“The decision will be across the board. The decision regarding the future of those already working on deputation will be made individually after assessing the raison d'etre of their deputation, and not all of them will be repatriated,” the officials said.

Meanwhile, it has been learnt that the provincial government is considering to appoint former Punjab chief secretary Hafeez Akhtar Randhawa and former P&D chairman Humayun Farshori as members of the Punjab Public Service Commission.

A senior officer said posts were going to be vacant in the service commission by Monday and both these retired officers were likely to be made its members. Their case was under consideration and that’s why they had not been issued notices to vacate their official residences in the GOR-I, he said.