BHUBANESWAR: Armed with a number of employees having experience and expertise in various technical domains, the State Government wants to get rid of outsourced consultants and encourage own talents for Project Management Units (PMUs) and Technical Support Units (TSUs).Chief Secretary Asit Tripathy has asked Additional Chief Secretary, Principal Secretary and Secretaries of all departments to identify talented employees having basic technical knowledge and right aptitude and groom them through training so that they can be utilised in PMUs and TSUs to handle technical assignments.
Earlier the administrative departments were allowed to establish PMUs and TSUs and engage external consultants to provide support in critical areas owing to shortage of manpower at different levels in the Government.
The decision to discourage engagement of consultants was taken after it was found that the consultants were engaged in routine works without contributing to capacity building.“The needs of PMUs/TSUs to have external consultants is a misnomer and the units can be run with internal human resources. Now we have several talents from various technical domains. They can be groomed and effectively utilised in various critical assignments,” Tripathy said.
Tripathy suggested to strategise the engagement of PMUs/TSUs to contribute to in-house capacity building of the departments so that the regular officers can be able to take over the responsibilities independently in future. Though in rarest of rare cases they can set up new PMUs/TSUs with external resources, it should be for short term to create on-the-job capacity building for Government staff and their engagement would be reviewed at the highest level on need based approach.
These PMUs/TSUs and consultants, however, can not function independently and must work with Government officers at the level of Joint Secretary/Additional Secretary while supporting/supplementing junior Government employees for developing better coordination and capacity building. Of the 500 Assistant Section Officers appointed by the State Government recently, over 70 per cent are BTech engineers, three are IITians and five are MTech certificate holders.