HYDERABAD:The Hyderabad Development Authority (HDA) has come up with a policy decision to not to consider the promotion of a diploma holding officer on the posts sanctioned only for the engineers.
In a letter written by the HDA’s Secretary Abdul Mannan Shaikh to HDA Diploma Engineers Association on Tuesday, Shaikh also clarified that a diploma holder officer could not be appointed as the Managing Director of Water and Sanitation Agency (WASA), a subsidiary of HDA.
He said a meeting of all the heads of the sub-wings of the HDA on February 27 had given unconditional consent to the proposal of the HDA’s incumbent Director General Fuad Ghaffar Soomro, who is also Deputy Commissioner of Hyderabad, in that regard.
He added that the DG had approved the rule under which only accredited engineers could be promoted and posts on the posts of the accredited engineers while a separate post of BPS-19 Additional MD WASA (non-accredited) was created to accommodate the non-accredited engineers.
The Secretary HDA said the same structure of the posts was notified in a gazette by the Sindh government on March 9.
He also referred to the October 3, 2018, order of the Supreme Court of Pakistan which had barred the government departments from giving positions of engineers to non-accredited engineers.
Shaikh informed that a meeting of the Departmental Promotion Committee (DPC) promoted 9 officers of HDA and WASA to BPS-20 and BPS-19 posts, including 6 promotions to BPS-19 and 3 to BPS-20.
Earlier on April 11, a non-accredited engineer Mirza Muhammad Ali Beg, who was among the officers promoted to BPS-19, wrote a letter to the DG HDA to review the new policy for the promotions.
He demanded that the former criteria of allowing diploma holders to be posted on engineering positions should be allowed to continue.