Union government to change 'clerical designations' for its workforce

NEW DELHI: Designations like Lower Division Clerk  and Upper Division Clerk in central government's employee hierarchy may soon  become a thing of the past as the Centre has proposed to change their  nomenclature. 

The Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) is considering  changing nomenclature of a few posts of Central Secretariat Clerical Service (CSCS) and Central Secretariat Service (CSS), which forms the backbone  of administrative work in the central government.

It is proposed to rename the post of Assistant in CSS as Assistant Section Officer, Similarly,the posts of Upper Division Clerk (UDC) and Lower Division Clerk (LDC) under  CSCS have been proposed to be re-christened as Senior Secretariat Assistance and  Junior Secretariat Assistance, respectively, as per the DoPT proposal. 

All concerned have been asked to send in their inputs or suggestions on the  proposal by September 18, it said. 

The total sanctioned strength of CSS and CSCS is 11,467 and 5,933 respectively. 

Earlier in March, it had  decided to replace the 'class' categorisation for specifying the seniority of  its employees with new alphabetical groupings. 

The posts under the  central government will be denoted as groups A, B, C and D instead of classes I,  II, III and IV in the service rules, it had said

The Class-I classification is for gazetted officers while Class-II refers to  mainly the non-gazetted officers, though there are some gazetted officers in  this category too. 

Class-III comprises clerical staff and Class-IV  (which is now subsumed in Class III or Group C) includes peons and helps or  multi-tasking staff in the government hierarchy. 

The Class-III (Group  C) employees have often expressed concern that they are taunted as 'third-class'  employees due to the categorisation.

Source : http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/