The Central government has approved the mass promotion of 1,592 officials working in the capacity of Assistant Section Officers (ASOs) to the post of Section Officers on an ad-hoc basis with immediate effect.

Announcing this here today, Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Personnel Jitendra Singh said that the promotion orders will be issued soon by the respective cadre controlling authorities.

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“The government has been granting mass promotions to employees in order to motivate them and overcome the problem of long stagnation. Another 2,000 promotions in ASO and other Grades are in process and hopefully, they will get promoted by this year-end,” the minister said.

Jitendra Singh said that in the last nine years, under the guidance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the government has periodically reviewed the longstanding stagnation issues in various central ministries that are a legacy of the past due to pending court cases, lack of vacancies in higher grades and other personnel issues.

He said that last year also about 9,000 mass promotions were made and before that, the Department of Personnel & Training (DoPT) granted 4,000 promotions in the preceding three years.

Jitendra Singh said he personally feels disturbed to come across cases where some of the employees working in the lowest rung of administration spend their entire service tenure of 30 to 35 years without securing a single promotion.

He said he has discussed the issue with all the senior officers in the ministry and several innovative means have been evolved to avoid stagnation at the middle and lower rungs of the administration.

He also regretted that in a large number of cases, stagnation in promotions was the result of litigation amongst the employees themselves and even though the DoPT tries its best to put forward its view in the court of law, the delay becomes inevitable.

“PM Modi has made efforts to ensure that government jobs are available to the maximum extent possible. It is extremely painful and disheartening to see employees sometimes superannuating in the same grade as promotions remained stuck,” said the minister.

The orders for mass promotion of these employees belonging to the Central Secretariat Service (CSS) have been issued after several rounds of high-level meetings in the DoPT. Even legal experts were consulted as some of the orders are subject to the outcome of pending writ petitions.