Govt employees fail to follow office timing
Source: Chronicle News Service
Imphal, April 25 2023:
One year after the state government shortened the working days from six days a week to five days while extending the working hours from 9 am to 5 pm to cover the loss of working hours, employees in most of the government departments are today flouting this schedule.
The decision to shorten the working days was adopted in a cabinet meeting held on March 22, 2022 .
Accordingly, the working days in a week were shortened from Monday to Friday instead of from Monday to Saturday.
The new schedule came into effect from April 1, 2022 .
However, failure on the part of the employees to maintain the schedule and failure on the part of senior officers to enforce the same has raised a question on the productivity of government offices and quality of services they are rendering to the public.
Lamphelpat area has numerous government offices which are supposed to cater to the needs of the common people.
However, most of the employees including higher officials in these offices could be seen coming to office late and leaving early.
As a result, people, who visit these offices for different purposes including land related services such as tax payment are forced to wait for several days.
In some cases requiring more processes, many people have to wait for three to four years before getting a solution.
Senior officers in the secretariat department are also aware of the situation but there seems to be lack of will on their part to come up with some enforcement measures.
Interestingly, these government employees, who never follow the schedule, are punctual when it comes to lunch hour, which is a 30-minute break whether they bring lunch box or not or they are having lunch or not.
On the other hand, the government cancelled holidays for some offices on March 18 and 25 in connection with financial year closing.
However, reports said that only about 3Q per cent of the employees attended offices on those days, showing a clear example of flouting government orders.
The only government institutions that have been following the schedule are educational institutions, which have fixed class timing.