Central Information Commission (CIC) right from its constitution in the year of 2005 is mainly working through outsourced employees many of whom are presently in age-group of around 40-45 years with their children in secondary and middle classes of schools. There are reports that they may be soon removed from their jobs with some ones already phased out. Already outsourced staff gets salary much-much less than what normally recruited government-employees get for the same job. Unemployment at this juncture of life will be against humanity not only to such employees, but also to their family-members. It is not an age to get employment easily that too in present era of economic recession. Sword of unemployment has even adversely affected studies of their grown-up teen-aged children. Many of outsourced employees were visible seen in tears in fear of being removed.
It is a matter of cost-audit and enquiry why and how CIC has assigned various tasks in central registry to outsourced agencies to create unemployment of their decade-old outsourced employees, that too when monthly bills of outsourced agencies are multiple times CIC used to spend earlier by getting the same tasks done through its trusted outsourced employees. For example, multiple mails addressed to a single person are now being sent individually in separate envelopes to benefit outsourced agency which gets exorbitant charge for handling each mailing-envelope. CIC has to further spend multiple times the postal-cost because of mailing multiple mail-articles in different envelopes rather than in single envelope. CIC should revert back to old system by cancelling contracts of outsourced agencies not only to ensure job-security of its old outsourced employees, but also to save public-funds presently being over-spent in getting work done through outsourced agencies.
Subhash Chandra Agrawal
(The views expressed by the author in the article are his/her own.)
