Govt calls for hiring freeze to cut cost

Finance Ministry to ministries: No recruitment for posts lying vacant for more than a year

Written by: ENS Economic Bureau

2 min readNew DelhiNov 3, 2012 12:39 AM IST

The government is battling hard to rein in the fiscal deficit for the current fiscal at the revised target of 5.3 per cent. In a bid to prune expenditure of the government,the finance ministry today issued a notification saying that no new recruitment would be made for posts which have been lying vacant for more than a year.

Earlier in May,apart from instructing the ministries and departments to reduce the non-plan expenditure by 10 per cent,the government had put a ban on holding seminars and conferences in five star hotels and on foreign travels of officials.

It is stated that the posts which have remained vacant for more than a year shall not be revived except under very rare and unavoidable circumstances and after seeking permission of the expenditure department with immediate effect, RS Gujral,expenditure secretary,said.

Given the huge pressure on government resources,the need for rationalisation becomes imperative. While on one hand,revenue realisation has been dismal,the disinvestment process for the year is yet to take off though finance minister P Chidambaram has been exuding confidence that the target of Rs 30,000 crore would be met.

Further,the Rs 40,000 crore budgeted by the government from retrospective amendment is also unlikely to come given the reversal of the amendments made in the Budget 2012-13. Slowdown in the economic activity has also impacted adversely the earnings of the corporates,leading to a decline in advance tax mop up.

The government earlier this week unveiled a fiscal consolidation roadmap,aiming to reduce fiscal deficit to 3 per cent of GDP by 2016-17. The fiscal deficit target was pegged at 5.1 per cent of GDP during the current fiscal.

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