No more 'clerical designations' in offices! Govt plans to rename the workforce

New Delhi, Aug 18: Clerks in Government offices who are considered as the backbone of the lower bureaucracy will soon become passe. According to new proposal by the Government, the post will be renamed as secretariat assistant.

The proposal has been given by the department of personnel and training (DoPT), suggesting this new nomenclature for the clerks.

If proposal will be accepted by all the departments then lower division clerk will be called as 'junior secretariat assistant' and upper division clerk as 'senior secretariat assistant' respectively.

DoPT circulated a note on Monday, asking all department to give their inputs and suggestions in this regard by September 18.

The total sanctioned strength of Central Secretariat Clerical Service (CSCS) and Central Secretariat Service (CSS) 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.

It is being believed that renaming is being done as people working on the post don't get due respect. At times people have this notion that clerks will not do their work till they oil their palm.

OneIndia News

(with inputs from PTI)