Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Wednesday abolished more than 9,300 posts in the Military Engineering Services (MES) in line with the recommendation of the Committee of Experts, headed by Lt General Shekatkar.
“In line with the recommendations made by the Committee, based on the proposal of E-in-C, MES, the proposal of the abolition of 9,304 posts in MES out of the total 13,157 vacancies of the Basic and Industrial staff has been approved by Raksha Mantri,” Ministry of Defence.
“One of the recommendations made by the Committee was to restructure the civilian workforce in a manner that the work of MES could be partly done by departmentally employed staff and other works could be outsourced,” it added.
In 2016, an 11-member committee was appointed by late Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar for optimizing defence budget.
The committee had made about 99 recommendations which if followed over the next five years can result in savings of up to Rs 25,000 crore in defence expenditure.
Out of these expenditures, the first batch of 65 recommendations related to Army was approved in 2017.
The recommendation was aimed at making MES an effective organisation with a leaner workforce, well equipped to handle complex issues in the emerging scenario in an efficient and cost-effective manner.