The recent decision of the J&K government to subsume engineering wings of various departments into Public Works Department will create only mess and confusion on the ground zero.
It is also to be seen that various political parties have vehemently opposed this move of the government. There will be joblessness because of the merger decision and the technical staff who are presently working in different departments are bound to face hierarchical issues in addition to the hiccups in their career progression. However, this decision has been taken in haste by the former Lt. Governor led state administrative council without any prior home work or taking any stakeholders on board. J&K government should have consulted all the stakeholders for threadbare deliberations before arriving at any such arbitrary and illogical decision. It was some few days back that All Migrant Camp Coordination Committee (AMCCC) have urged Lt. Governor, Sh. Manoj Sinha to revoke the decision regarding merger of engineering wings of Relief Organization with R&B, citing the reason that it will put the migrants living in various camps at Jammu to lot of hardships and miseries in getting their day to day problems redressed.
Engineering wing of the Relief Organization (Migrants) Jammu was formulated/ enacted to look after the developmental works of the migrant camps, quarters and migrants schools located at various locations of Jammu and Kashmir. It has been highly observed that the R&B department lacks the requisite capacity to handle such a broader mandate of handling engineering wings of around 15-16 departments. The R&B and PHE departments are already overburdened with huge load of work so it becomes completely impossible for them to look into the problems of the migrant camps. Moreover, there are many migrant engineers who are idle and their services can be utilised in Relief Organization's Engineering Wing so that the developmental works can be executed in migrant camps without any hurdle. Further, there is a provision of separate budget for the migrants, which is being utilized via Relief Organization (Migrants) Jammu for safeguarding the interests of the migrant families. By subsuming the engineering wings with PW(R&B) will create only confusion and lack of coordination thereby resulting in sufferings of the migrants.
It is also in place to mention here that the present Relief Commissioner (Migrants) Jammu Sh. T.K Bhat is the epitome of honesty, hard work, dedication as well as of punctuality. His workaholic attitude has been appreciated by all migrants. So his experience and skills could not be utilized for the developmental works in migrant camps if in case Engineering Wing of the Relief Organization be submerged with the PW(R&B) department. It is high time now that the present J&K UT Lt. Governor must take due cognizance of this matter and must revoke this controversial decision of merging of Engineering Wings at the very earliest.
Vivek Koul
Gole Gujral Jammu
