PATNA: The state government departments are facing acute shortage of engineers with 66% of their positions lying vacant.
According to the data compiled by the Bihar Engineering Services Association (BESA), only 5,470 out of the sanctioned 16,293 posts are currently filled. This leaves a vacancy of 10,823 engineers against the total sanctioned strength.
There are a total of 7,011 vacancies of junior engineers, 2,523 of assistant engineers, 936 of executive engineer and 277 of the superintending engineers. The situation becomes even more alarming for senior positions with 65 of the 69 posts of chief engineers lying vacant. Even more, all the 11 engineer-in-chief posts are lying vacant.
According to Rakesh Kumar, general secretary of BESA, the government has been managing the situation by giving additional charges to the working engineers. "The workload on engineers is immense. A single engineer is posted at multiple positions simultaneously," he said.
They often have to fill in for more senior posts while still receiving salaries pertaining to their permanent designation, he said. "We have requested authorities to recruit more engineers or to at least make them permanent in their current positions. But nothing has been done so far," Kumar added.
The vacancies are remarkably high even for base designations of junior engineer and assistant engineer. "The government is supposed to make recruitments on these junior positions on a regular basis. However, the delay in recruitment of a new batch is as much as 8 years," said Anjani Kumar, an executive engineer with the state rural works department.
The dearth of working engineers can be seen across departments with the most vacancies in the water resources department at 3,743, followed by the rural works department at 1,421, road construction department at 1,124, public health engineering department at 989, building construction department at 814 and the minor water resources department at 537.
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