Dear Comrades,
DRACONIAN RULE OF CONTRIBUTORY NEGLIGENCE
A DEMOCLE’S SWORD
(By M.R.MEENAKSHISUNDARAM, Retired
Supervisor, SBCO, Chennai GPO)
PREAMBLE
Department of Post is a very big
organisation with multifarious functions and spread over the entire country.
Due to the vast business turnover as well the huge size of the human resources
employed in the day to day functioning, there will be some losses to the
organisation at times. Any enterprise this size will have some unscrupulous and
shady characters amidst the staff. There will be losses due to frauds, theft
and burglary, excess payments and compensation to be paid in consumer cases.
Even so the loss due to these aspects is negligible compared to the revenue
accrued through business. In Nationalised Banks million and millions of money
is written off as loss due to bad debts. But in our department not even a
single paise is allowed to be written off as the Administration is very keen in
recovering the loss from its employees whether the employee is directly responsible
or not. In my 39 years of service in this Department, I came across almost all
type of cases of recoveries towards pecuniary loss and dealt with them. It is
my humble opinion that the bureaucracy usually acts in an inhuman way to
recover the loss though they have powers to write off the loss. For instance
the Director of Postal Services has power to write off any excess payments in
Savings Accounts and there is no monitory limit. In my experience I was able to
convince a DPS to accord sanction to write off some minus balances in Savings
Accounts as they were pending more than 10 years and the Chief Postmaster was
trying to recover the excess payments from the staff who has no part in the
transactions. The problem with the present staff is that they don’t want to
familiarise with necessary rules of the Branch where they work. In spite of
their superior academic qualifications, the present staff’s knowledge in
departmental ruling is dismal and so the Administration is able to capitalise
on the lack of knowledge and impose punishment of recovery without much
difficulty. With current level of shortage of staff in Post Offices and the
unwanted decentralisation of Accounting system, there is bound to be a lot of
frauds as well as short comings/lapses on the part of the operative staff due
to heavy workload. If this state of affairs continues, almost all the staffs
have a permanent column in their pay bill under recovery towards Audit
Objections. The Rule of recovery is a draconian rule though the rule was introduced
with good intentions and the Administration utilises this rule to impose
recovery unilaterally to all employees without any sympathy. First of all we
have to understand the implication of this rule and then try to tackle it. Here
are some aspects of the Rule: Read More
Writer: Mr
M.R.MEENAKSHISUNDARAM, Retired Supervisor, SBCO, Chennai GPO
SA POST
